There has to be something said for this. There is barely any noise on Google's pages and pretty much everyone has used Google for the past few years. That means that everyone is used to a search engine with very little noise. Yahoo, MS, and Ask don't exactly have "flashy" search pages but just glancing at their pages, you can see more distractions. I think this just amplifies the thought that Google is better.

Going to another search engine just feels weird.