My standard for years, but it's been getting slower and more cluttered as AV tries to become a web portal. All the Web. Web search results give title, URL, and a brief exerpt. Use double quotation marks for phrase searches. One of the oldest web search engines, and still going strong.
Results are relevant and easy to skim, and search speed is good.
Also has a nice advanced search pages with clearly outlined options. Excite, like AltaVista, is working hard to be a one-stop shop web portal. The result is a cluttered, busy main page. Excite uses a concept-based searching method that tries to understand the idea that you are looking for, rather than just the words. In my test search, this did seem to lead to useful results for a somewhat vague query.