I have to admit to still being in love with Google, for the most part. Gmail and Maps are staples of my life. But Search is starting to piss me off. Today, I need to find some web icons for email, the web, etc. so I type it in to Google. What do I get back? A bunch of spammy sites trying to download spyware (if I had a PC, I would have been worried about that). Anyways, eventually I found some usable icons but I wasn’t totally happy with them and I’m thinking I might need to find something better when I have more time to search. Sigh. That was the feeling we had before Google –when it came along, it helped us find what we were looking for quickly and easily on the net.

But as it has tried to become all things to all people on the enormous web, it has become the dumping ground for all of the garbage as well as the stuff we want to see, and like MySpace, now gunky.

I find myself wanting to surf the web and sitting on a blank Google page wondering what to search for (yes, I know, hot nights at my house). But I’m interested in too many different things so I don’t know where to start. I need my trusted friends, so I go to sites I know of, but I was looking for something new, not the same sites I go to all the time. Grrr, the scene repeats over and over…

Tonight I found an article totally worth reading–alternate search engines and what are the innovative things going on in search software? It never occurred to me that anything innovative might be going on at Microsoft, but this article cleared up what that annoying banner on NY Times is–Bing, a Microsoft search engine masquerading as the new thing in search. No, I need my internet reality to be really different again and that never came from MS. I’m getting bored!

Want to see a concert to celebrate your new job? Pick up a ticket using meta-search eninges FanSnap.com or ZebraTickets.com.

Some search innovators are tackling interface design to help take some of the guesswork out of search links. If you’re looking for something visual — say Michael Jackson moon walking — try Searchme.com, which shows entire web pages in its results as if they were album art in iTunes.

For music, try Fizy.com or head to video search engine Blinkx.com to navigate your way to streaming songs you can’t find anywhere else. Read the whole article >>

Oh, and that is just one option out of many creative and dang useful-sounding search engines. I’m going to start experimenting again. Thanks Wired, I should have known to come ot you for a good idea.