You could go straight to search.yahoo.com, that's pretty clean. Or bookmark this link (the url in your area may vary) in firefox and give it a keyword like 'yah' and next time you can just type 'yah football scores' in a tab and it'll feed that straight to yahoo search.
I made a big move away from google sometime back, I was worried it was getting too much of my info. I found decent desktop or web alternatives for Reader, Gmail, search, etc, and my mind's been more at peace since then.

The german 'departement for IT security'(or so) has warned the chrome shouldn't be used for everyday browsing - at least in it's current state.
There are so far 6 critical security holes and the browser communictes nonstop with google sending even keystrokes back there according to them.

That doesn't necessarily mean that google wants to know all your keystrokes but right now they do.

Does yahoo search support filtering of search ("-word" to return results without word "word"), "and", "or", advanced operators ("inurl:", "intitle: link:", "allinurl:", "site:", "cache:")? If not, it's not google search alternative (people often tend to recommend any kind of serach engine that they think is "good", but doesn't support all this somewhat advanced stuff I need).

It is irrelevant. They have gained a great deal of power and that makes them dangerous regardless of their intentions. Intentions can change literally overnight. Capability takes a lot of time to develop.

You should safeguard yourself against google just as you do against any other potential threat.

Given Google's propensity for collecting information and NEVER discarding it, I don't trust them at all. For that reason if no other I won't run chrome.

Heh, that is cool. Of course they don't want to know your keystrokes, what possible use could they have for such data ?

There's only two in your list that I use real often ( '-word' and 'site:'), and yahoo supports both those. Ok, I admit the results are not always as good as I'm used to getting with google, but its got pretty decent stuff for a power user.

Google produces very good results for web sites, but for images I prefer ask.com. Google image search often turns up random unrelated images.

Short answer:

Yes, Google is evil

Long Answer:

Google is evil for many reasons. One being that it is a corporation. By US law, corporations are legal entities. That makes them a person with no soul. People with no souls (re animated dead for example) are generally evil (think pet cemetery).

I suppose in some ways it isn't evil like for offering code for Open Source (how can it be open source then offer so many copyright stipulations??)

darn... well my break is over but you guys can fill in the rest.

Corporations, much like other imaginary entities, are controlled by people and used to do whatever people want to do ... destroy, cause suffering, break laws, make laws etc., the fun stuff you know. And then when it's time to blame someone, well of course the corporation is responsible, so shoot the corporation by firing squad, the workers get laid off, the CEO runs away to Brazil with his share and whatever he could steal and starts a farm (coke, weed, whatever he prefers).

They aren't that evil, people just like calling the evil because their motto is do no evil, if they were evil they would do stuff like bribe iso, spread FUD around everything etc.

Define what you call "evil".

Lets consult wikipedia

*reading wikipedia*
la la la
Evil
Evil
Evil
Yes Google....
wait a second....

There is also a class of deliberate acts, known to be harmful to another, which are not considered evil because:

1. they are acts of self-defense or defense of another
2. they are considered justified; see Just War


My bad. Google is just defending it self. How could I be so wrong! All hail Google. (prays to the logo sitting next to the search bar on his browser window.) how sad is that... firefox's (aspell??) spell checker even corrects 'google' to 'Google' instead of 'googol'. spellchecker doesn't even spit out 'googol'... just 'Google' (first), 'goggle', and 'go ogle'. IN FACT! it says 'googol' is spelled wrong! WTF! it's a conspiracy!

It's beta software and they might want to have as much info as possible why the browser crashed.
Thats the friendly version anyways.

Those who use google (at all) are destined to regret it!

https://ssl.scroogle.org

!

Here's the unfriendly version:

First there was racial profiling and then there was electronic profiling. Don't think everything you email and publish and post isn't processed and saved away for some dark rainy night.........