Google is at the moment the number one search engine in the entire world. It is so popular among Internet users, that its name had become a verb: to google = to online search.

Google was born in 1997, long after other still popular search engines were created. It is based on a thesis by now millionaires, but back then students, Serghei Brin and Larry Page, at Stanford University. It was described as revolutionary, with great scalability search engines, at those affirmations, made in 1998, are still true to this day. Its biggest innovation is PageRank, a system to sort pages according to their relevance to a particular search and to their global importance in the same time, offering every user exactly what he or she is searching.

Useless to say, Google it's among top 5 sites world wide. Some figures to see just how big Google really is:
* approx 8 billions indexed pages
* approx 1 billion indexed images
* it is capable of indexing different types of documents, not only html web pages: pdf, ps, xls, ppt, doc, rtf, swf
* offers support in over 100 languages
* has around 90 millions users every month

But although its power in searching data and infos, some times Google its just not enough in providing you the answer you are hoping for. Then what do you do?

One solution it can be to be an unfaithful Google user, and try its main competitors, maybe a search with them will give you what you are looking for. A top 3 of Google competitors would look like this:
1. Yahoo! search engine
2. Live.com (Microsoft)
3. Ask.com

Although not as popular as Google is, they each have a huge amount of users, and are quite good in returning relevant informations.
They have different systems in ranking and sorting the pages, and may surprise you with pretty good guessing in what you are looking for.

Let's take them one by one and do a little overview:

Yahoo! is one of the main websites. It all begun with a list of favorite URLs, made by 2 students, Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994. It gained popularity due to the little descriptions they added to each URL. Long after it's launching, Yahoo made it's first attempt in search engines. Now, Yahoo! features a much better search engine. Yahoo! Search ranks results according to their relevance to a particular query by analyzing the web page text, title and description accuracy as well as its source, associated links, and other unique document characteristics.

The second in this top is live.com. If you are

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