Everyone knows Google is the best search engine...right?

When a brand becomes a verb, you know you've got a killer product. When a brand becomes so comfortable, so familiar, why go anywhere else?

Chris Dannan at Fast Company outlines some reasons why you might want to consider straying from the familiar. Google still is, by most measures, the "best" search engine, but depending on what you want to do there are better options.

I've continued to toy with Bing, and when it comes to image or video search, I'm even more supportive of it now than I was when I posted about it two weeks ago. For those specific purposes, I think it truly is better than Google.

In the case of Bing, they have the opposite problem of Google. Where Google is the "best", comfortable and familiar, Bing is associated with "evil" Microsoft, their past search failures, and the product is still new and unknown. But if you push all that aside and look at it from a feature perspective alone, it's actually got some really good features.

Other notable newcomers are Wolfram | Alpha, which rather than searching information, computes it. It's a fundamentally different concept, which has led to some derision out on the web (i.e. people joking about awkward "search" results, when that's not really what its designed to do), but despite that it can do some impressive things. It'll be one to watch as it develops.

Chris @ FastCompany also profiles Worio, an engine that uses your past behavior to help guide you to new things related to your searches, but that don't necessarily have any direct keyword connection to the query you entered. Translation: it helps you find things you're looking for, without you having to find the magic mix of keywords to enter into the search box to surface it. It's in some sense an outgrowth of cluster search, but with the additional layer of behavioral shaping of the results.

Privacy folks may not like that, but it's a step in the right direction in many ways. As a longtime search guy, it becomes pretty clear that what Google puts on the first page of any given search result is essentially law...entrenched players over time can effectively own those pages, ultimately rendering certain search queries somewhat useless since you're all but guaranteed the same results over and over.

So don't be afraid to try new things and pull yourself away from habitually Googling, when you could be Binging, Worioing, or Wolframming.

//Google image via Tyler Jordan, eVisibility
//Wolframming image via Superboy #92, October, 1961