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Is it? I don’t believe so. I’ll just call myself an analyst and say that the stock price in 6 months will be 200 so play accordingly. How is that illegal or even unethical?

As a capitalist I'm not averse to Google’s having made lots of money, but as an engineer, I was a bit concerned that there was no remarkable innovation behind their financial success. Google is an advertising company. I liked the comment by the Clusty owners, and have used them without knowing about that. One of the pioneering search engines, and a web crawler which I believe was used by Google in the early days (someone will correct me if I'm mistaken) is Alta Vista. It is my default search engine. It has as clean an interface as Google. I have compared seaches on obscure topics and find Alta Vista offering less redundancy and garbage. It seems (an important qualifier) as quick as Google. Some of the obsure engines such as Dogpile take a bit more time.
There is an innovative search interface called Ujiko which I sometimes use. I believe it is based upon the Yahoo search engine, but try it and you will see both why it is not for everyone, but may also see its benefits. The colors it offers are frankly yucky, but its categorization capabilities are very powerful. It has no advertising.