I was using Alta Vista and preferred it. It had fairly sophisticated search options that Google never got like stem and wildcard searching.

The problem was that yahoo killed it. They shut down its crawler and it started going stale.

Plus they didn't have as good a solution to index spam as Google's pagerank.

It was basically a story of product developing a lead, getting sold for a quick buck, then the acquirer shuts down innovation and tries to milk it, with bad timing because google was chomping at its heels.