It's interesting to note that while the early Fender pickups used alnico magnets, virtually all of the pickups that Leo Fender designs for G&L used ceramic magnets. I think that most of the aftermarket blade pups deigned by Bill Lawrence also used ceramic magnets.
I believe Lace Sensors (and Lace pickup in general) use ceramic magnets as well. There seem to two camps with Lace: love 'em, or hate 'em. I used Sensors for quite a while and and was very happy with them. Then I tried some Fender Vintage Noiseless (designed by BL actually) and preferred those to the LS.

Another similarity that I have noticed between my G&L "MFD" pickups and my Bill Lawrence pups is that they have relatively low ohms, but very high output.
I had a set of G&L MFD's from a S-500 (they actually "vintage" from around '82) the DCR of those were 4.5k Ω and were the loudest pickups I've ever owned. However, as my hearing (and playing) matured, I found them a bit too bright without re-EQ-ing the amp when switching guitars back & forth.

...I have come to think that, for an ordinary person who is not an EE, the most reliable way of judging output and how will pick up is going to sound is to listen to the pickup in a guitar similar to the one you want to put it in, where the player is using a style that something you might use too.
One of my biggest pet peeves with demo videos, is when all you want to hear is what the pickups sound like and the knobhead doing the video is just playing through an amp with death metal-like distortion! Aaaarrrghhhh!!!