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even approach the competency and customer satisfaction Google seems to have achieved? There are more than one, there are hundreds, which is part of the reason none of them are as well-known as Google.

Other major search engines originating in a pre-Google era such as Ask.com and AltaVista.com are making a comeback. They don't offer much more than Google, but they're a good mainstream alternative if you're just tired of looking at Google's white background and cheesy holiday logos. There are also some smaller websites, such as FyberSearch.com, which feature completely original code, often written in its entirety by just one person.

The best advantage to a site like FyberSearch is that the programmer has often included features that they personally want. While you may not find all the features you ever wanted in one search engine, you can find some pretty useful ones at various sites across the World Wide Web.

Some of FyberSearch's features include the ability to filter pages so that you only see FAQ, sign up, or log in pages. You can also look only for pages containing at least a certain number of words, or pages ending with a certain file extension, like ".gov" or ".edu."

One of the central components of Google's business model is AdSense advertisements. When those ads appear on websites other than Google, the website owner collects the ad revenue, with Google taking a cut, of course. However, Google makes a great deal of its money from targeted ads which appear in their own search pages. Who do they share this ad revenue with? Nobody. Therein lies their greatest profit margin. Some sites have caught on, and while it restricts the monetary success the webmasters could achieve, at least they've escaped the burden of being stuck in Google's shadow.

Why use Google when you could search with a site that shares their ad revenue with the searcher? In that case you have a monetary incentive to search through them, which is a far cry from other search engines. Slashmysearch.com is a great example. They keep a running tally of activity on their search engine by adding user-specific tags to their search site which keep track of just who is searching and how much. Simply set your unique URL as your homepage and you'll get tenths of cents every time you log in. Sure, it barely covers the cost of electricity, but it's better than nothing, right? Slashmysearch.com operates through Snap.com, which feeds in results from all the major search engines, as well as some sponsored results,

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