Google is a no-nonsense (in their own words) search engine. It does search and nothing else. And it does it so well, beating every other search engine. The best things I like about Google are these:
Speed: You can’t imaging being able to find something from more than 1.5 billion web pages in less than half a second. But Google does it. And the site too loads very fast.
Relevant results: No junk links. Google gets you the best results first.
Easy website: Google does nothing else and their site is very comfortable to navigate. I still don’t understand why other people like to clutter their sites!
Awards: To get a huge list of the prestigious awards, do go to https://google.com/press/awards.html. I don’t want to copy-paste the stuff here.
Recent additions to the already acclaimed search service were Image Search, Directory Search and the Newsgroup search. Image search helps you to search for photos or graphics or animations and from experience I can tell you that the results are very very relevant. Directory search will search the Google directory, which is partly human-maintained. Usenet search will search NNTP group postings as old as 1995. If you are looking for something technical and you don’t find it in the regular search, you are sure to get it here.
Yahoo.com, Netscape and Rediff.com now uses Google for search. What else do you need to prove they are the best? Nothing beats the Google.