Yes, the Google project looks pretty transparent. It could return results different from your ISP's, but they may even be less cooked.

.onion is an alternate root. There's an interesting page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root giving the history of them.

A friend was using OpenDNS for a while, until we figured out they were MitMing google.com and intercepting his queries. I wonder if they still do that.

Of course, ICANN has decided to begin selling TLDs for a $200K application fee. There goes the neighborhood.