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Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

searchenginewatch.com

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Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#61

Post by heymijo »

lucideer wrote: post #47
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…

> Bing has seemingly given up on some of the big things, like Maps As far as I'm aware Bing (along with Facebook and Yahoo!) are backing https://wego.here.com/ these days. I'm curious to see where that goes...

That is much snappier than Google Maps.

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#64

Post by thinkmassive »

petra wrote: post #53
rochellle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is the !g bang gives you personalized results as good as google results ? Also, it's a bad design decision to make bangs belong to search engines. In the past the firefox extension lookpick[1] solved that problem very well: They crowdsourced search engnines, had their own search box in the right corner of the screen, and to make it easy to pick the right search engines, search engines used searchable tags. On top of…

Chrome has built-in support for multiple search engines (many sites take the liberty of doing this automatically). You can customize the keyword that triggers each one.

For example, if you want to search HN you could add:

URL: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s Keyword: hn

Then you simply type "hn" in the omnibox, hit space, and enter your search term.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#65

Post by jplatte »

petra wrote: post #53
rochellle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is the !g bang gives you personalized results as good as google results ? Also, it's a bad design decision to make bangs belong to search engines. In the past the firefox extension lookpick[1] solved that problem very well: They crowdsourced search engnines, had their own search box in the right corner of the screen, and to make it easy to pick the right search engines, search engines used searchable tags. On top of…

> Is the !g bang gives you personalized results as good as google results ?

Including !g in your search query simply redirects you to a google search with the same query (minus the !g). So you can set your search engine to ddg, then select the actual search engine by starting with a bang and whatever search you want. Some examples:

!gi - Google images

!gh - GitHub search

!w - Wikipedia

Starting a query with ! on https://duckduckgo.com/ also gives you autocompletion, so you can quickly discover what redirects are available.

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#66

Post by coolsdude2282 »

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.

I switched to DDG for the privacy selling point, but once I learned about !bangs I stayed. It is so much better done than any other site. Even if I had zero concerns about privacy I would still choose it over google or bing simply because of the wealth of query features that are so easy to use! I hate how google does queries and Bing is beyond useless.

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#68

Post by petra »

thinkmassive wrote: post #64
petra wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the !g bang gives you personalized results as good as google results ? Also, it's a bad design decision to make bangs belong to search engines. In the past the firefox extension lookpick[1] solved that problem very well: They crowdsourced search engnines, had their own search box in the right corner of the screen, and to make it easy to pick the right search engines, search engines used searchable tags. On top of…

Chrome has built-in support for multiple search engines (many sites take the liberty of doing this automatically). You can customize the keyword that triggers each one. For example, if you want to search HN you could add: URL: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s Keyword: hn Then you simply type "hn" in the omnibox, hit space, and enter your search term. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426

Sure adding your own is possible, or using some chrome extension like SearchBar, but having everything available, crowdsourced, and tagged, is totally different experience.

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#69

Post by nostrademons »

garysieling wrote: post #54
zerop wrote: post #48

Question: Why vertical search engines dont succeed much?

There are tons of successful vertical search engines, but the line between "search" and an app gets blurry. As examples, Amazon, Octopart, Spotify (if you count music search), the DPLA (a non-profit library search), Shodan, IconFinder, etc. I've explored this in personal projects- a search engine for lectures ( https://www.findlectures.com ) and stock photos ( https://stickstock.com ).

Also Kayak, HipMunk, Yelp, YouTube, Netflix, AirBnB, Alibaba, etc.

It ceases to be considered "vertical search" and becomes a category in its own right if you do it well enough, even though the way you interact with many of these apps is that you type in free-form text into a search box and it performs some fuzzy matching.

Re: Alternative search engines to Google (2016)

#70

Post by ronsor »

gambler wrote: post #11
LeoPanthera wrote: post #8

This article doesn't seem to say, so, how many of these search engines use their own index and don't "borrow" one from another larger engine? DDG uses Bing and Yandex, for example.

I'm willing to bet no one* does their own search crawling aside from companies the size of Yandex and larger. Google carefully manipulated web standards to make sure you can't do that effectively without tons of upfront investment. You pretty much have to run a customized headless browser to get real content. And then you have to figure out how to interact with whatever you get, since increasing number of websites ar…

My search engine crawls its own results. The downside is the index is very tiny, under 100,000 pages.
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