Alternative search engines to Google (2016)
searchenginewatch.comBing 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 the big things, like Maps, and failed to promote others (like Translator) in ways that really compromise the core offering.
Bing Maps used to have a very legitimate edge over Google; then they stood still for years and I'm not sure they could ever catch up.
To make matters worse, Bing has lost lots of cool, useful features; features that I could show someone and then expect them to legitimately consider Bing. For example, searching for a song used to let you immediately read the lyrics without ads, listen to the song through Zune or buy the song through various providers. Wolfram Alpha used to be directly integrated into the search engine; it was extremely powerful and convenient.
I really would have liked to see a Bing that didn't take as many steps back as it took forward; that Bing could be a real contender.
> 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...
Interestingly wego.here has more up to date satellite imagery for my house than either Bing or Google.
That is much snappier than Google Maps.
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.
OOKLA isn't that reliable for speed testing, they let companies who pay mess with the results, some ISPs who sense your going to ookla give you better bandwidth, etc.
look at the link : :https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/42zh66/what...
Search for ookla, or just read the thing for speedtest recommendations.
Recommendations:
google supported tool: http://www.measurementlab.net/tools/ndt , http://www.measurementlab.net/tests - various types of tests
Hmm, that doesn't seem to work here (The Netherlands). Maybe that's US only?
Works in the UK too. Maybe if you search for "speed test" in Dutch?
it's not working then... not very useful (for me)
I switched from Google maps to Bing maps a little over a year ago - their edge over Google is that their mapping system still works like a mapping system, and therefore does useful things, instead of whatever the hell it is that Google maps has been trying to do lately. I really hope Bing never catches up, because it's better the way it is.
I don't know about you but I have been incredibly frustrated with Google Maps in recent years. They aren't standing still, but they certainly aren't moving forward.
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.
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.
This only seems to apply to Chrome's default start page which looks like google.com, but actually isn't. It seems to work similar as in FF when navigating to google.com first.
It happens when I navigate explicitly to google.com as well.
But I think I have seen other behaviours in the past, so it all probably the exact Chrome version etc.
> 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.
Update: I just found out it's related to the "Google Instant" feature, which was somehow disabled in my case - it worked in private mode, but not when I was logged in. Enabling it brought back keyboard shortcuts.
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.
> DuckDuckGo isn't that great
Do you mind elaborating on this a bit? I've been using DDG for a couple of years now and, although at the beginning I would fallback to Google very often, now that changed. I still fallback to Google from time to time, but it's more to have a confirmation that, as parent says, the results are disappointing than anything else. Now I probably use Google after trying g DDG once in every 10/15 queries. It used to be one in three when I switched.
To be honest, I even find DDG to be way way better than Google in certain results. Programming related queries that would produce StackOverflow results are one example. And I'm not even considering the preview feature that DDG has that shows you the accepted answer to the SO question right in the search page.
One thing I don't like though, is the way the images and videos preview works (not in the image tab, in the search tab) on DDG. I find that row of videos/images to just be annoying since I would explicitly make an image search if that's what I needed.
That said, my experience now is that if DDG results are disappointing, there's a very very high chance that Google results will be disappointing too.
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 that, if you add easy help for search operators for each site(also crowd sourced), would be really useful.
I wish there was something like that for chrome.
[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lookpick-sear...
> 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.
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.
Sure adding your own is possible, or using some chrome extension like SearchBar, but having everything available, crowdsourced, and tagged, is totally different experience.
(!i takes you straight to Google Images)
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.
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
Needs a non-facebook and non-twitter way to signup. Not everybody has social media accounts.
And what authorization systems we needed? We thought through the mail, but it's very easy to create many bots.
Maybe Github, G+, ...?
That works too; perhaps I should create my own authentication service and api...
It is good idea, but for developers...many users can't create own authentification method Tell me please about your search engine Ronsor, it is your code? Or you use some open-source project? Why you create this search?
I 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 place for everyone in it.'
Thanks for mentioning Ecosia. I was actually working for them over a year ago.
They're a bunch of really good people on a great mission.
Ecosia has a great business model, if I wasn't already a dedicated DDG user I would switch straight away...
Bing is very good for doing... umm... "movie" searches. The preview functionality works well and is very useful.
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
One 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/
I remember trying yacy years ago – do you know how they compare?
Yacy is a search engine. Searx passes your query off to other search engines.
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 :-)
Check their help page here: https://duck.co/help/settings/regions
!wen goes to english wikipedia
!wit goes to italian wikipedia
and so on
Thank you!
!hn for the 10X people ;).
https://searx.me/ and https://www.qwant.com/ and https://www.startpage.com/ will respect your privacy
I've been slowly transitioning to DuckDuckGo recently, I love some of their quirky features [0] - though old habits die hard. I guess it is a matter of making their engine the ubiquitous one via the default browser URL/search box etc.
[0] - http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-really-cool-things-you-can-do...
Stopped using Google a while back. Used https://www.startpage.com for years. Just switched to https://www.qwant.com late last year.
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 are SPAs. Google itself has it easy, since developers actively modify their site to fit Google's capabilities.
But hey, everything is "fine" as longs as the Web keeps a bunch of developers employed with six-digit salaries. They will put up with any amount of accidental complexity and ignore any effects on future innovation as long as their jobs are secure. (And those jobs are more secure than ever because you need ever increasing number of specialized professionals to keep the increasingly complex technology stacks operational.)
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* One exception I know of: Web Archive. But their coverage is pretty spotty and they aren't strictly speaking a search engine. Still, it's an awesome effort. At lease someone tries to swim against the tide.
My search engine crawls its own results. The downside is the index is very tiny, under 100,000 pages.
No Baidu? Yandex aside, I'm curious as to what other major non-English search engines are there.
https://chorki.com/ This is a search engine for Bangla language serving more than 1milion informations, a startup from Bangladesh.
I tend to use EpicSearch.in as much as possible (generally in the Epic Privacy Browser), then click to Bing/Google if the results aren't good. EpicSearch's results are so-so (built on Yandex), but it's TOTALLY private and has no ads so it's my first go-to option. Maybe 25% of the time I'll click onto Bing or Google.
I find that each search engine has a slightly different "dialect", and I've been tuning my search wording for years on google. Using other search engines is actually sort of challenging and often frustrating. I do like peekier.com though. I feel like it's a step forward for innovation with great layout/menu-design.
Thanks! I was completely unaware of Boardreader; if done right it could solve the problem Google created when they stupidly removed the discussion search filter.
I don't know why no one linked https://peekier.com in the comments yet.
I run a personal blog and occasionally I see some traffic from Ecosia:
It uses money generated from ads seen in search results to plan tree. Nice idea, not sure if the underlying implementation is Google.
For the record, DDG has past 15 million direct query threshold in March.
http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/13/
They really started growing again since August last year.
is it really an alternative if it's using google's data?
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.
Can anyone tell me if I am logged into chrome and use a non-google search engine, are they tracking the queries I make in the omni box?
[2016]
Thanks! We updated the title.
http://tsearch.in is also a good alternative
Always trying to find options for my genealogy searches
DDG "gave" me unknown family bible location recently (in La)
What about millionshort?
Some Boardreader linkes are broken, especially ones from stackoverflow. It could be useful.
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.
no ratings, no basic information, now let's compare it to this
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=arrival
unless there will be another engine which will provide me with same information as you can see on right side of screen I am not even bothering to try it, it's such basic feature that I think every engine should provide it
Google has this feature, so I am not sure why they can and others can't.
I like Bing webmaster tools. In some areas it is even better than Google's
bing isn't half bad, but i still use google a hell of a lot