What should you NOT use Google search for?

Finding torrents. Use The Pirate Bay, http://Torrentz.eu, or IsoHunt instead.

Choosing a search tool is not an "either or" proposition. Every serious researcher should have a full toolkit of search tools and use several of them every time they do research. For example, SweetSearch searches a limited whitelist of websites, and thus is the best search engine for students to use for research projects, and often for adult queries as well. Dogpile searches several search engines at once. Databases should be used for chronological searches (i.e. ensuring that information is current), as these are difficult to on on the Web. Wolfram Alpha should be used for computations.

For anything during your presentation for Microsoft execs.

Stalking your ex-partners.

For finding the answer to complex questions. Instead, use quora.

When/If you do not want the search results to be influenced by any personal information, DuckDuckGo is the search engine to use. The users are not profiled, so the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble is avoided. So essentially, it means that all users are shown the same search results for a given search term. It claims to put privacy first and as such does not store IP addresses, does not log user information and uses cookies only when needed. Do go through these pages: http://donttrack.us/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo on Wikipedia And, of course try https://duckduckgo.com/!

When you want more than answers.  Google is built to provide you that one perfect link that answers your question.  They even say their objective is to "return timely, high-quality, on-topic, answers to people's questions." [http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html] When is this a problem?  When you are trying to "see what's out there" or explore different facets of a subject.  For these situations, your best hope is to find a blog post that lists the top resources because Google will no longer produce that for you. This is the problem my company, http://nuggety.com/, is trying to solve.

1. To search about your acquaintances/friends on Facebook :P 2. Searches based on Twitter hash-tags. well, after seeing your edits, the following is my answer: 1. Google has pretty much indexed most of the internet ( at least English speaking sites) i dunno about Russian ones. So pretty much in general yes, Google will be able to give you something relevant. But lately I feel. Its not how to search (by how to i mean which search engineer etc etc) , its what to search . Many times people don't have context or search based on your tastes. For example, Flipboard is an Ipad App, which I use a lot. Based on my tastes , I get to read many articles on the net. This is why I prefer Flipboard and not Google reader or rss etc. Similarly, there are other apps like Zite which fetch you content based on your taste. I personally think that Google has not made much stride in this area. 2. To search for Music based on Hymms (If/When i only remember tune of the song and not name). There are apps which do that and do it very well. As of now, I don't remember the name of the app, but I'll let you know.

I can think of a couple of different things besides the ones others have mentioned: 1. Phrases in foreign languages that are very different from English. 2. Patents (the USPTO search engine is much more powerful) 3. Price shopping (have had more luck with froogle and http://shopping.com but not consistently) 4. Finding instruction manuals. Not sure why, maybe those pages are not SEO friendly? I have found it quicker to specifically search the manufacturer's website than trying to find it with a generic google search. Note that this list is probably invalid if you are a google power user. If you are comfortable with using modifiers and creating regex style search queries, you might find it equally quick if not quicker than an unfamiliar search engine. I often find myself doing exactly this especially when I am hunting for info on websites with a poorly implemented search feature.