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Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

searchenginewatch.com

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Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#21

Post by Hasknewbie »

With the recent news covering Google Search's often insane "sugested answers" ("Obama is the current king of America, and is planning a military coup"), fake news SEO trickery, and the general bad feeling about how they rank their results for the last year or so, I've had the thought that Bing/DDG might become competitive again, not because they improve, but because Google slowly got worse. Google is basically the MS Windows of search, due to their dominant position they're constantly targetted, so you're more likely to get the info/search equivalent of a virus.

Hardly comforting.

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#23

Post by sveme »

Markoff wrote: post #13

most of the engines don't pass my simple test - enter name of movie and i expect to see aggregated basic info and ratings of movie at least from 2-3 websites without opening them it's a bit better with currency exchange 5USD to EUR

Duckduckgo is pretty good in that respect: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=arrival&t=ffab&ia=meanings

However, the real reason your wish will not be granted is that those 2-3 websites are absoluely opposed to such a scenario, as people will not visit their websites anymore. If I remember it correctly, Google had that feature years ago and was sued by Yelp(?) because they basically stole all their traffic.

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#25

Post by blauditore »

ethana wrote: post #14
nxc18 wrote: post #5

Bing offers a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, its search relevancy is actually really great, its special search features (weather, elections, etc.) and graph tools are generally better than Google's and they overall just seem to try harder on search nowadays. On the other hand, search isn't the only important thing - presumably that is why Google doesn't seem to focus there. Bing has seemingly given up on some of…

One of my favorite things on Bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=speed+test

Should it do something special? It doesn't seem to be the case for me, I see nothing unexpected.

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#26

Post by vkorsunov »

Hasknewbie wrote: post #21

With the recent news covering Google Search's often insane "sugested answers" ("Obama is the current king of America, and is planning a military coup"), fake news SEO trickery, and the general bad feeling about how they rank their results for the last year or so, I've had the thought that Bing/DDG might become competitive again, not because they improve, but because Google slowly got worse. Google is basically the MS…

We developing https://bubblehunt.com - it's search platform, where every user can create own search and provide independent results, like miniGoogle. Now it is alpha version. We love this project because we can provide information that we think is important, interesting and truthful. More info: https://medium.com/@bubblehunt/faq-9dd92c741b23

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#27

Post by blauditore »

briantakita wrote: post #17
Safety1stClyde wrote: post #2

I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year without ill-effects. Although sometimes I have to go to Google, often when the results are disappointing I try !g and the results with Google are just as disappointing. It's also actually easier to switch to an image search using !gi than it is to click the image search with the mouse at Google's site.

DuckDuckGo also has keyboard-friendly navigation. No clicking necessary.

This is something that's been annoying me for years now. Keyboard navigation used to work on Google with Firefox, but stopped a while ago. It still works on Chrome, and by now I'm pretty sure they're intentionally not fixing/enabling it on FF - not sure why though. I don't see any reason other than pushing users towards Chrome...

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#28

Post by elorant »

The problem I have with most alternatives is that they are mediocre at best in regional results. Google really excels in that area. I tried Bing a few years ago and every time I had to search something in Greek the results were dreadful when compared with G. I guess it might be better nowadays but I'm already hooked with G. so no point moving on.

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#29

Post by Insanity »

richardboegli wrote: post #9

What the article skips over is !bang searches in DuckDuckGo. This allows you to search other engines, but still have theirs as default All the engines mentioned can be searched via it. !b !bing !s !startpage !vimeo !giphy etc.....

Absolutely love the bang searches in DDG. The most used for me is !w for sure, easily go to a wikipedia article.

Only issue I have with it at the moment is that it tends to look for articles in my native language instead of in English but you can probably configure that somewhere and I just have not looked yet. It falls back to English anyway when it can not find one in Dutch.

EDIT: For people on here, !hackernews might be useful :-)

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#30

Post by scandox »

elorant wrote: post #28

The problem I have with most alternatives is that they are mediocre at best in regional results. Google really excels in that area. I tried Bing a few years ago and every time I had to search something in Greek the results were dreadful when compared with G. I guess it might be better nowadays but I'm already hooked with G. so no point moving on.

Tried using Duck Duck Go in Ireland I find myself switching back to Google a lot
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