I've actually been a little disappointed in Google recently. Local business searches haven't lived up to the normal standard for Google. I've had more success with
Windows Live Local.
For that reason, I decided to try
MSN Search and
Yahoo at work the other day. They were horrible. It wasn't their results, I'm not sure if I even got to them, it was the home page. The flickering backgrounds and rotating images were nicely done in AJAX, but kept pulling my eyes away from the search box. I wanted to know why ASP.NET wouldn't render a caption tag inside a table with a runat="server" attribute, not the top 5 romantic getaways this summer. Google gave me what I wanted and I won't return to the competitors until they've changed their ways.
Eventually, quality search results will become a commodity (or at least close to it). Google's clean search interface is best for people who want to get things done because it doesn't introduce more distractions. There are enough at the office, at home or wherever you're working as it is without search engine AJAX implementations adding to them.