We compare cross-correlation based time delay estimation to two alternative algorithms: a time-domain least squares Taylor method and a time-domain based bi-coherence analysis. For short-window seismic analysis and uncorrelated noise the Taylor method performs best. This is demonstrated on synthetics and with a North Sea 4D data example for which we find a significant reduction in NRMS (13%) with the improved algorithm, when compared to cross-correlation time-alignment.