I love google, but it's getting damned obnoxious. Now it randomly adds a google redirect into your search results, so that instead of going to somesite.com you wind up going to google.com/url?somesite.com. The purpose of this is unknown, although we can assume it's for tracking and/or advertising. All I do know is that I'm fed up with it.

I need a good search site, which MUST included cached pages with highlighting. I also need a good image search, although that can be intergrated into the same engine (like with google) or a seperate site (integrated is preferred). Yahoo's search seems to be a pretty good option (I need to try it out more to see for sure), are there any other decent search engines that include cached results?

Try Mozbot ( http://www.mozbot.com/ ) which is actually just Google with a nicer interface. Mozbot is working in partnership with Google, but they have different ideas about the interface.

Their version of Google's "Cache" is accessed by clicking on "History" and then choosing the "Google" button (if you click "Archive.org" you get no highlighting, but more old-versions of the page).

If you only need cache and NOT highlighting, you can also try
Clusty ( http://clusty.com/ ) and click on "[cache]"

If you only need highlighting and NOT cache, you can also try
Ixquick ( http://us.ixquick.com/eng/ ) and click on "Highlight"

There are enormous reasons to use
http://www.scroogle.org/
instead of Google. Google has recently been notorious for the reasons
mentioned on http://www.scroogle.org/ website. This has been much
reported in the media.

Privoxy can do fast redirects. All it does is to check the URL for any valid URL in the query string and immediately skip to that valid URL in the query string (you might want to restrict this feature to certain URLs/websites only). Perhaps other privacy proxy servers can do the same.