Teoma appears to be as good a search engine as Google.
I’ve looked at Teoma a bit, as I’m just as nervous as the next cat about Google being the only game in town. (Competitions is a good thing, remember that!) Currently if you go to Teoma and attempt to submit a url, you are sent to ask.ineedhits.com where you are presented with an order form you can fill out, and pay to be included. This is not how the web works. This is not about equality. This is about money. From what I can tell, unless I’m missing something, a new site can’t just say to Temoa “please index me” unless they pony up some cash, or get some other site to link to them so the indexer follows the link. Though it takes a few click to find, Google has a simple (and free) way to submit a site for indexing.
Also of interest, from the About Teoma page:
Search results appearing under the heading “Sponsored Links” are provided by Google®, a third party provider of pay for performance search listings.
I’m not even sure what to make of that, besides the fact that Teoma seems dependant on Google for some things…