[deleted]
Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
31–40 of 87 posts
Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
#32I'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 isn't that great, but the !bang options make it easy to diversify, and branch searches to multiple targets, to compare outcomes.
Two things become obvious at that point, and the main one is that other search engines don't just customize search results to individuals, they actually spend costly human resources currating and QA'ing results. DuckDuckGo's search results kind of suck, and the reason they're not as good is because the results are not groomed to the same degree, by as many eyes, nor to the same level of quality.
The other obvious thing quickly noticed is that DuckDuckGo's !bang operators are so, so, so much more handy than some of the other horrendously mangled, inscrutable query strings you wind up landing on, that would require 5 or 10 clicks, navigating the intended user interfaces of the parent sites that actually host the results.
Compare using !googleimages on DuckDuckGo, to what actually happens when you click and type for results at https://images.google.com?
It's kind of silly that you can't just pass a query string to Google, and that DuckDuckGo does their query strings better than Google does for it's own product.
Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
> I don't see any reason other than pushing users towards Chrome...
Well, I often get banners nagging to update to the "faster modern whatever Chrome browser" at googe.com. I really hate this bullshit.
Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
#35I recently discovered Ecosia (ecosia.org). Seems to use results from Bing, maps from Google, and has an easy 'out' to show results from Google. Nice 'hook' as well. From their About Us page: 'Ecosia is a social business run by a small group of dedicated people. We work together to create tools that empower everyone to easily do good by planting trees. We believe our trees have the power to make this world a better pl…
Ecosia has a great business model, if I wasn't already a dedicated DDG user I would switch straight away...
Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
#36What 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 mi…
Check their help page here: https://duck.co/help/settings/regions
Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Disclaimer: I'm a Googler.
I find google.com is more broken on Chrome than in Firefox. In firefox, it just just annoying moves the search field as you start type. In chrome you are not allowed to use it at all. Instead it forces you to use the location bar.
Sometimes the location bar does a Google search. Sometimes it goes to the URL you type in. Sometimes, other things happen. Occasionally the thing that actually happens is the thing you wanted.
Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
#38Bing is very good for doing... umm... "movie" searches. The preview functionality works well and is very useful.
Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
#39Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
#40One search engine to consider is Searx [0], you can easily host your own instance locally or on a public facing server [1]. What it does is aggregate search results from multiple engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo...), proxying your request making tracking and profiling impossible.
[0]: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ [1]: https://searx.laquadrature.net/