DuckDuckGo has done some good in improve the visibility of the non-search issues related to search. I especially like the focus on privacy as well as the !bang

DuckDuckGo has done some good in improve the visibility of the non-search issues related to search. I especially like the focus on privacy as well as the !bang syntax (Try !django us phone field). Plus a simple add-on is all it takes to change your default search provider. I think innovation on "search" itself has matured enough where you aren't going to see a radical improvement in results. Google become the market leader thanks to crushing competition on quality of results, but that was a decade ago. At this point there isn't enough room to differentiate in the field on results alone, but I don't think that is a symptom of Google's dominance. Take a look at Bing's flight results. Useful in that I care about prices and dates, not which site I buy a ticket through. Almost Wolfram Alpha style applets inferred from the search terms.