Yahoo is king in many Asia Countries, not Google. But Google is the king to most of Asia webmasters because of Adsense.
In terms of alternative as a General Web search engine, there are really no alternatives to Google if accuracy is important to you. There are however, plenty of alternative nice search engine if that's your cup of tea, retrevo as a specialist product search engine and powerset as a specialist sematic search engine for Wikipedia for example.
At one point of time, everyone thought Yahoo's portal was the best and going to take over the world! The beauty of the web is that innovation will bring technology we have never seen before and disrupt the incumbent. Google search service is great but you never know what's just around the corner that can change everything.
Only MSN can beat Google if they really concentrate on their effort about search with visitor satisfaction..
If Microsoft buys many many manay servers to compete with google caching capacity, then MSN could compete. Ass for now, only Yahoo is relative alternative in English language. In the terms of entire world, Baidu.com is definitely powerful competition.
There is a new search engine out there that claims to offer the best results, even better than G or Y. It's cuil.com .But i didnt like it so much
The only one which I can only think of is yahoo. Even then, I rarely use it. It's like once in a blue moon.
If MSN and Yahoo combine that would be the best alternative. I can see that good alternative should have good search results. I can only see that at http://www.hophunt.com but not on cuil.
ive tried netscape and ask.com... both are ok... google's the best and it has monopoly over the search market as of now i feel...