UGN Security
"The Wall Street Journal" conducted a survey where it asked 2,000 adults to find what the leading cause of death was for 25-34 year olds by using Google and other search engines like Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Lycos and MSN.

People who used Google found the answer to this question 55% of the time and the folks who used the other search engines found the answer 52 to 54% of the time. The firm behind the study said: "The search engines all return roughly the same results."

People in the study said that the reason many prefer Google is because it is not as cluttered as sites like Yahoo!. This shows that other companies could slim down their search engine sites' designs to effectively compete with Google.

Source
That is when you ask average adults. When you ask us super googlers that know how to really 'use' google with advanced operators, we know that google is the best search engine ever built.
maybe googles problem then, try to make some of those features more user friendly and push a few of them (or alternate) so ppl are actually aware of them. 90% of the stuff google does, you can't find easily.
Agreed, you only know half of googles features with the google toolbar lol...

As for cluttered engines, i can't stand it, their [censored] annoying...
I think it has mostly to do with keyword choices. When I watch my friends and family use google, they usually choose *horrible* search terms that usually don't get to the point of the search. More than making features obviouse (most don't help find results, besides quotes and AND and OR), I think it's search terms that poor users should concentrated on.
AskJeeves is as effective as Google my [censored]. All this "survey" shows is that people need to be taught how to use Google, as you guys said. Education is always the answer.
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