My favorite "alternative" search engine is
Clusty. I find it especially useful when searching for more obscure things that I'm harving a hard time otherwise honing in on. It's powered by VivĂsimo. It draws from multiple search engines, including web/blog/wiki/news. Custom tabs can be created to customize what is used.
Most importantly, it "clusters" all of the results, essentially dropping them in folders allowing you to view a selection of the total results by category. Attached is a donationcoder search, showing how it broke it down into reviews, discussions, et cetera.