Since 2010, Google has been loading more and more scripts and useless sidebars on their google.com front page. I’ve tried using Firefox with NoScript to turn off the scripting, but that brings along its own compatibility problems. I find that google.com’s stupid scripts make it harder to obtain meaningful search results. Then they removed the cached option from the search results page. That was the last straw.
I tried http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0 which helps, but I’m tired of fighting with Google’s “improvements”.
Today I’m changing my computers’ home pages to yandex.com. Maybe Google will come to its senses, but I don’t hold much hope that that will happen soon. I’ve defined Google.com as the home page on hundreds of computers over the past ten years or so, but from now on, it’ll be yandex.com instead.
Further reading: Russian Internet Company Yandex Biggest U.S. IPO Offering Since Google
Russ' space 
I have been using my.yahoo.com since maybe 1995. I’m still happy with it — I get lots of newspapers feeding into it so I can stay on top of news from several cities, countries and global. I also have stocks picked out that update constantly as well as weather etc. The home page has been really good.
However, in the past few months, clicking on a link will not only take you to that page, but a bunch of scripts start running and slow it down. The yahoo.com news pages are the worst! They run more scripts than pages from New York Times or several other newspapers, for example.
When I hear my computer start to complain, I will sometimes copy the address out of Explorer and paste it into FireFox and read the news there, with the protection of an add-on, NoScript.
Maybe I just need to delete all of yahoo’s own newslinks and switch to reuters or some other service for general news.
I have only used google’s search a few times in the past month or so. In my search bar at the top of the my.yahoo.com page, I can select yahoo, google, bing or live search engines. I selected yahoo as my default search and have been very happy with it (although I can select any of the others for an individual search). Yahoo search still provides cached pages, which I find very helpful for quickly finding what I was looking for amongst all the clutter. It highlights search terms in colors like yellow, blue, red, etc so that when I click on a cached page, I can see right where to go on that page! I used to like google’s cached pages but they seem to have disappeared, so no more google searches for me!
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Your use of my.yahoo.com sounds good., Maybe I’ll give it a try.
I’ve quickly become fond of Yandex.com’s simple user interface. It works well for a product that’s still under development. While configuring it, I’ve occasionally bumped into some undecipherable pages that are 100% Russian language, so it’s not yet ready for primetime.
When I do resort to Google, I use the “http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0” URL, which helps make it s user interface almost acceptable.
I’m surprised that Larry and Sergey have allowed Google’s user interface to degrade so dramatically.
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BTW, Yahoo’s search results do not all have cached pages, but nearly all do.
And even though I no longer use google’s search engine, I still refer to it as googling, since everyone knows what that is while “searching” is too broad a term! Just like I have no idea what brand of kleenex I used last week when I had a cold…
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Uh oh, Yahoo search is now delivering a lot of messages like this one: Could not find the requested document in the cache. Looks like all those cached articles are disappearing from there as well, although the cache link appears in the search results just like Google’s used to. However, when I click on the link, too often I get that message. Now what?
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The english language version of Yandex.com is still evolving, but it’s a decent alternative search engine with reliable caching that’s easy to access. It doesn’t always display cached pages with their original formatting, though. I’d place http://yandex.com in my browser’s Favorites.
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Do you know if there’s a “user script” for the Greasemonkey extension that will disable the autosuggest? There are a number of scripts that disable that search result tracking thing, where when you click on a search result the link changes to a long Google redirect link. I chose one of the scripts a few years ago and it’s been working.
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I’m not familiar with Greasemonley. I’ve read about it, but have never used it. Sorry.
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