Which search engine is the best? In our opinion, the one that helps the user find exactly what is looking for! Various search engines exist today and many others have been around in the past and faded away. Others are starting up and each single one claims to deliver the “best results”
In our opinion, the best results are those that are meaningful to the objective set. Alma5 team tried to find out the performance of some of the most popular search engines in finding its own website and blog by using several keywords and phrases.. Below is the ranking in the results that the search engines have returned. 
It is worth mentioning that in some cases the search engines were ranking Alma5 home page higher when searching for a phrase that was in a sub-domain. Also it was very strange that even when the keyword was ‘Alma5′, other webistes that are not titled or have in their domain the word ‘Alma5 ‘ got higher rankings like Google or Webcrawler…
Yahoo, Bing and Webrawler return no results at all when we use a specific phrase that is nowhere else written in the exact same wording. On the other hand Ask.com returns hundreds of results that contain some of the words in our phrase and Dogpile returns 2, probably sponosred results.
One common feature of all web search engines is the speed of delivering results. Some may be faster or slower than others but all deliver results in such a timeframe that appears to be instant. This is no news as also is no news that most search engines do not perform a live search when the user presses the search button. They usually deliver results based on indexing that takes place in advance - actually is an ongoing process. In our opinion users should use the search engine that delivers what they need and try a different one if the results dont match the objective.
Google became like an industry standard by providing a simple white page with an entry field and a search button while had a very advanced indexing technology at the background. This leads to the other parameter of choosing a search engine - the user interface and experience. In our opinion this is an area bing of Microsift may find some additional users at the expense of Google as they use a dynamic aesthetically nice and fresh image as well as take searching a step forward by facilitating posterior filtering of the results using some categories that can lead into finding more relevant results versus the objective.
Only future will tell whether users can experience better results. The only sure this is that the search engine business is massive as the massive amount of information on the Internet, by default drive the need of search engines.