I think if you read the history of how google got started, and how they revolutionized web searching (back when the internet was first starting to grow enough that a basic search algorithm wouldn't cut it anymore), and take a look at the overviews of how their pagerank system, etc. work, it's hard not to appreciate the coolness of it, in my opinion (as a geek). As far as I know, the best any other search engines have done is just copying google, and trying to keep up. Meta-search engines like metacrawler typically end up just giving me a larger quantity of crappy results, which still doesn't help when I don't feel like looking at more than the first couple of pages of results to find what I'm looking for.