They also act as tire tracks as you spelunk the Internet, undermining your right to privacy.
Most sites listed here allow use with cookies disabled.
You can also search your hard drive for cookie files, make a shortcut to these files from your desktop, and manually erase cookies after internet sessions. Some search engines only include feepaying sits thus censoring your view of the net. To evaluate competing search engines, do identical searches and compare results. Google currently seems to be the quickest as well.