Why not Yahoo?
As far as I can just about every search engine uses results from Google directly or indirectly by using a source like Bing that in turn gets some of their results from Google. If you won't call something a search engine unless it doesn't use anyone else's search results you might have a hard time naming more than one. You can't escape Google.
That being said, Google is also a good search engine, so it’s difficult to compete with them regardless of personalized results.
What "Google getting better" actually means is that it is more likely to return what most people want as the first page hits. That is a tradeoff, because it obscures everything else whenever what most people want is wrong.
As a programmer, you're only going to be doing searches for things that are non-obvious, so there is a vastly higher chance of Google giving you the wrong answer than for the average search.
There is a fundamental contradiction between a search engine that tries to show you only what it thinks you want, and the fact that you don't know exactly what you want when you search, until you see some results.
I think there's something like a conservation law, that the more you make it easy to find some things on the Internet, the harder you make it to find others. Kind of like the proof that you can't compress all strings.