Everything Else

So everyone is coming out with lists, predictions and report cards, at the risk of being a "me too" I'll post my own opinion of the Big Four search engines.
First, I divide search engines into two broad categories: 1. Stand Alone index, this means that the search engine's own index is big enough and the algo is good enough that you can use it alone; 2. Meta-Search quality, the index and algo are not quite good enough to use as your only search engine but are good enough to use as part of a meta-search engine.

Major Search Engines -

Google: Stand Alone. While I don't thing the index is nearly as fresh or as relevant as it once was, Google is still the standard by which all other search engines are judged. What I do like about Google is that they still tend to favor what they think are content sites over commercial sites if possible.

Yahoo: Stand Alone. Yahoo is the only other search engine that really can be used alone for searching. Yahoo seems to favor commercial sites slightly in ranking, which is good if you are shopping or searching for products, but can be annoying when searching for information. Still it is a quality index.

MSN/Live: Meta-search quality. MSN has one of the freshest indexes and most aggressive spiders in the search engine world. I like that they still give significant weight to on-page factors in ranking, and they are not totally dependent on link popularity schemes. Unfortunately, this leaves them open to spam. I think their quality is slowly improving and hopefully MSN will find a happy balance between on-page and off-page ranking factors. MSN is great to have in a meta-search engine because of the freshness and aggressive spidering.

Ask: Meta-search quality. I think Ask is getting close to Stand Alone status, but their index is still smallish, not as fresh as I'd like and their spider is much too timid to deeply spider sites, especially dynamic sites, so it is missing lots of pages of content. Still they have not got there in 2006 but I have hopes they can spider better in the near future.

Minor Search Engines -

Exalead - Meta-search quality. This French based engine is impressive and has a nice interface. Personally I like it a lot. However, on commercially competitive searches it still ranks too many spammy sites highly. Good as a secondary engine in a meta-search.

Gigablast - Meta-search quality. I think Gigablast should be included as a secondary engine in any self respecting meta-search. Gigablast will dig up and rank some good sites the majors overlook which makes it valuable.

Wisenut - Meta-Search quality. Wisenut has good relevancy, but not very fresh index. Good to have in a meta-search because, like Gigablast, it digs up and ranks some good sites the others miss.

Note: I use Ask, MSN, Gigablast and Wisenut indirectly every day for searching as part of Clusty meta-search, my default search engine. Those engines seem to do a good job for Clusty and other meta-search engines. When I need to dig deeper into a topic than a meta-search can provide, I use Yahoo and some directories like dmoz.org.

The scary part of this whole report card is that with the exception of relative newcomer Exalead, the report card is pretty much the same as it has been for the last few years. I think we might be stagnating badly in the search engine web index industry.