well, I still prefer google. Nothing says love like when your boss tells you to go google something (wierd how its become a verb, but I digress)
I like the grahpics/layout. Its slick/eye pleasing, but not cluttered. I like how there is minimal things on the zapmeta.com page when you first go there, unlike yahoo which bombards you with loads of useless stuff.
The 'need help' feature on the pref page is really nice. One possible suggestion would be to show the tips with style sheets and making them visible with a javascript so it does not require a page reload. But then again,the page is very light so you dont notice it much either way.
The fact that your prefrences have been saved should be a bit more noticable once you click submit. Clicked once or twice expecting to be put back to the main page or something, and then noticed the little blue text at the top saying it was saved.
The related searches is nice, I like it when websites have that (I dont belive google has that available, only other search I've seen with it is like, MSN and AskJeeves)
One feature I like that Google has, but you seem to be missing is if you misspell a word (and I am a horrible speller) and get no/very few results, it asks 'did you mean....?' and has a link to another search with the correct spelling.
ie: searching for proxomtion gives 3 results, when the person is really looking for Proxomitron which yields many.
One feature which I'd like to see on some search engin, but not many/any seem to have it would be being able to goto the url
www.zapmeta.com/sql stored procedures
and have it do a search for SQL Stored procedures for me.
all around, not bad. the pref/advanced search was usefull and loads quickly and the results pop up fast.