Try searching for “phpbb” or “vbulletin” or even “wordpress” along with any old search terms. Many of those hits will be completely irrelevant to your search because google will match the “Powered By” link at the bottom of the page. This bug should be fixed by adding a “do not match” option )as distinct from the current “Don’t show pages that have any of these words” functionality); if one uses the current functionality to avoid “Powered by”, now you completely miss those sites with such text on the bototm, whereas my suggestion would simply overlook hits bracketed by (or completely matching) the offending text.
As an aside, I notice that “google” itself is maybe the 7th hit when you search for “search engines”. Is it possible that the crappier the search engine, the higher up it is on the list? Since search engines are so critical to using the web, the good ones would not be linked to as often as the mediocre ones because everyone already knows about the good ones.
As a second aside, I think google may have complete web domination. Quite a few browsers give the same hits as google does; which ones are actually using the exact same backend? One should definitely take a look at these alt search engines; they make an interesting case.
