Google is now the world's most powerful website, and if it goes public this year, its young founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, will become extremely rich. Their five-year-old company has already cracked its biggest problem, which is how to make pots of money from selling advertising space without carrying any banner ads. And while there are other places to search the web, most websites are now dependent on Google for a large proportion of …showed first 75 words of 1492 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1492 total…does not always find the pages you want, so it is just as well to keep some alternatives handy. The main ones include stalwarts Alta Vista and All The Web, plus Vivisimo Vivisimo.com and Teoma. There are also "metasearch" search engines such as Dogpile and Metacrawler, which will send your query to several search engines at once. Google knows you have a choice, and it doesn't hurt to exercise it from time to time.