PC World asks: Does Google deserve all that traffic, or is it living off its reputation?

The verdict: Yes, Google is still the best, but has competition chomping at its heels

PC World:

Does Google deserve all that traffic, or is it living off its reputation? Are people using it because they’re not aware of other, potentially better search engines? To find out, we pitted Google against its big-name competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search, as well as against smaller challengers such as AlltheWeb, AltaVista, and Ask.com–plus a couple dozen of the specialty search services, including Blogdigger, Picsearch, and TubeSurf.

Our verdict? Google is indeed the best search engine, even though two other services topped it–barely–in our text-search tests. Google’s index proved to be the most accurate, comprehensive, and timely of the bunch. It also bested the majority of the specialty-search sites we tried, meaning those that focus on a category or file type, such as videos, images, news, blogs, or local info delivered on a mobile phone.