So where will search engines evolve to?

With Google not doing many improvements to their search results page, I can see a certain group of users actually preferring other search engines.

Live.com - Microsofts new generation - is so slow here, it's unuseable. And it actually doesn't have any benefits over Google. In fact, it looks like an mere ajaxified copy of Google.

More interesting are the contenders Snap.com, Exalead and Clusty.

Snap.com definitely has the prettiest Ajax interface of the three. It has keyword completion like Google Suggest, and will display a screenshot of the currently selected result. However it only displays one screenshot at a time; and since screenshots are most useful for finding again a page you didn't bookmark thats only of limited use.

Clusty offers you the benefit of grouping the results automatically by topics. If you aren't very experienced at searching, this can offer huge benefits for you. Searching e.g. for "sports" with Google is rather pointless. Clusty actually gives you useful ways of refining your search.

Exalead sits inbetween. It has an ajaxish interface (but isn't overdoing it like live.com), it has screenshots (but not as big as snap; you can get an overview with 12 screenshots per page which is IMHO much more useful; however there are still some slight bugs) and it has some clusterin (though not as good as Clusty, but you can select multiple clusters)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to what these search engines become, and what Google will do to draw even with them.

(Yes, I'm aware that some people like Google because of its minimality. But not everyone does. Some users will actually need search assistance such as offered by Clusty and to a lesser extend by Exalead.)