An interesting discussion was sparked by an article in the Guardian about the problems with Google search. 

Academia's big guns fight 'Google effect' | | EducationGuardian.co.uk Scores of academic search engines provide a heavyweight alternative to the commercial ones and work against what Brighton University's professor of media- Tara Brabazon has termed "the Google effect" - a tendency towards mediocrity.

One alternative was offered here:

The ‘Google effect’: A trend toward mediocrity, or away from it? « Dana’s user experience blog The ‘Google effect’ as I see it is not ‘a tendency toward mediocrity’ in students, it is an exposure of the dire mediocrity of the interfaces and search process for academic material. Google has democratized information searching, and made it possible for the average untrained adult to find information — academic publishers and other information providers need to catch up by providing seamless, well-ranked searches (again most likely through Google Scholar), and at least for those who are subscribers to their resources (either individually or through their institution)* make the results available with a single click. The alternative to this will not be improved information literacy skills, people are not going to learn something more difficult if they believe the tools they have will do an adequate job. I hope the end result of the Google effect will be a trend away from mediocrity–the mediocrity of academic information interfaces–and toward usable information search interfaces for all kinds of materials.

I've seen other criticisms of Google and attempts at offering alternatives but the truth is that Google's stochastic algorithms are miles better than anything else out there. Not perfect, but very very good. Whether I use Google scholar or plain old Google search, I'm always amazed at the accuracy and relevance of the results. When I go back to MetaLib which has a much larger access to source materials I have to work much harder to get results and the interface is just awful.

Some people complain that Google relies too much on popularity of sites but popularity is part of the game of relevance. In fact, when I'm trying to get into a new topic, I want to read what the 'popular' people had to say about it. And, as far as I can tell, it takes just a bit more work but Google will find the less relevant results.

I can see how the traditional keyword-base searches still have their place but I suspect there's something very uncomfortable in the idea that a stochastic search gets better results than one based on painstaking collection and categorizatoin of resources.