I’ve just been pointed at Mahalo (thanks Phil,) a new search engine. What sets it aside from the mainstream engines, is that it’s maintained by humans, rather than robots. Obviously, that raises concerns about it’s completeness, but it also means that you can trust its results not to be SEO-spam. In my limited testing, I’ve found it very good, with nicely presented, categorised and, most importantly, relevant results. It also provides results from the major robot-backed engines as well, in case they don’t have what you need indexed yet.
I doubt it’s going to unseat google any time soon, but I’m going to trial using it as my search engine of choice for a week or so, and see how it goes. I’ll report back when I’ve actually used it in anger.