Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google.
Eh. I switched my default to Duck Duck Go and I'm pretty happy with it. Not quite as magical as Google was in its heyday but then neither is Google. Set up keywords for your searches ("g" for Google, "b" for Bing etc.) and they're all just a keystroke away anyhow.
And if you're too lazy to set up your own custom searches or you're using a borrowed machine, Duck Duck Go has some slick built-in "bang" searches: "!imdb aronofsky", "!msdn system.diagnostics" and so on.
In terms of results from crawling, I would consider Bing a "serious" competitor, although still a distant second. They are well-funded, used in ~30% of searches in the US, and don't look like they're going away anytime soon. It would be sad if they did because Google would then be a total monopoly.
Though DuckDuckGo does do its own indexing, AFAIK it is limited and they mostly rely on other search engines (Bing and Yandex most probably). So it's more a meta-search engine not quite in the category of Google.
Today, I just posted a Show HN for a search engine and feed reader I've been working on. It also has "bangs" except they are called activation codes and start with a ?, like
"?jq appendto". It's easy to add your own "?" handler, as it doesn't require any approval to do so. I'm just getting started so I would love to get any feedback.
Eh. I switched my default to Duck Duck Go and I'm pretty happy with it. Not quite as magical as Google was in its heyday but then neither is Google. Set up keywords for your searches ("g" for Google, "b" for Bing etc.) and they're all just a keystroke away anyhow.
And if you're too lazy to set up your own custom searches or you're using a borrowed machine, Duck Duck Go has some slick built-in "bang" searches: "!imdb aronofsky", "!msdn system.diagnostics" and so on.