Is there an alternative to Google?

I just read a post in TechCrunch by V. Wadhwa highlighting some of the problems associated with "googling" in the wild. It seems that spam and advertising seems to rise to the top everytime, contaminating the results. I've found that depending on the topic, a Google hunt can be quite a safari expedition! You have to be quite ruthless in filtering out the commercial sites with a series of "minus this" and "minus that". And I always have the sneaking suspicion that I've just eliminated the perfect site by doing so! Wadhwa offers a solution in the form of Blekko. (Here's the complete article.)


Here's how Wadwha describes it: 

"Blekko was founded in 2007 by Rich Skrenta, Tom Annau, Mike Markson, and a bunch of former Google and Yahoo engineers. [...] In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges." 

A quick look at the site makes me want to explore this "new" search engine. Might be a good addition to the research toolkit!