Ask HN: Which feature would make you switch away from Google search?
There are some interesting discussions going on here: https://twitter.com/RichardSocher/status/1488552221532905479 Complete discounting of geo-IP on request. Not currently possible: For what it's worth you can set the language and region in Duckduckgo and it stores it with a cookie. I mostly use it when I do second language searches and it is like using search in that country. just curious. Are you willing to forgo relevant results when searching for "restaurants near me" to preserve your IP addr? It’s not about IP addr; I live in Sweden but don’t speak much Swedish. Searching for things takes me to Swedish sites. Quite frustrating honestly. (Another related thing that’s frustrating is people using my IP to determine language instead of the Accept-Language header my browser sends) not OP, I live in Germany and 2 things happen with Geo-IP: 1. When I look for English words on Google, it prioritizes german dictionaries, sometimes for many pages instead of a) English dictionaries OR b) actual English pages relevant for that word 2. When I search for programming stuff, it prioritizes german pages, such as blog entries to the english documentation/english blog entries, which I find in any case more complete and diverse. Some peope prefer reading everything in German, but that is just not my cup of tea can't remember I've ever searched for "restaurants near me" instead of using a map app or a self-choosen identifier. (And given e.g. Google Maps (on web) doesn't even reliably get the state right for my initial position, why would I rely on geoIP for that?!) What quickly comes to mind: No priority for news sources that are in a direct business relationship, every filter and setting can be modified without creating an account, heavily penalize advertising, no hiding of URLs, not filtering content for political reasons. For me, it is mostly the feature of getting the results I expect when I input a search term. Over the years I've been conditioned to Google, and have learned to intuitively formulate search terms in a way that gets me what I want almost immediately when I use Google. When I tried switching to DuckDuckGo, suddenly the way I formulate my queries no longer resulted in the results I expected. This resulted in my falling back on `!g` over 50% of the time. I've recently started trying out the Kagi beta and it is the first time I'm not `!g`-ing constantly. It seems to give me what I want with the queries I expect. At first I was a bit worried that it might not find my perfect balance of news-vs-older-content, but I was pleasantly surprised. Searches seem to result in a nice ranking of current events vs other information. It also brings back the "Discussion" search feature that Google used to have in a good way. If the result quality continues to live up to my expectations I can see myself paying for the service down the line, but will see how it goes over time; as well as how the privacy stance of the devs progresses in regards to both privacy and data ownership of subscribing users _and_ of the subjects of queries (in relation to RTBF requests and such). Privacy worked for me -- DDG for several years now. Searching for the actual terms I just typed. User interface. I'd prefer search results to appear above the fold. A few years ago Google started putting ads and contextual widgets above search results. Sometimes on mobile not a single result makes it onto the screen due to ads and other content appearing first. I already switched to DuckDuckGo, and I'm happy with it. I recommend an ad blocker. Haven't seen any of that kind of thing in years It’s not just ads, but non-results content like “other people searched for”. Search for “shoes” for example. With an adblocker, Google shows no results on screen for mobile. With DDG I just get results. It’s not the same for every search, but many Google searches put non-results content above the results. Umm I switched away years ago to Duckduckgo but currently trying out Kagi which is even better. >Kagi $10 per month minimum after beta. I wish them luck but DDG for the win at that rate in my opinion. Search is a good and much needed example of how simple, context based advertising can be applied in an effective and user friendly, privacy respecting manner. Plus, Kagi has only a few possible outcomes. These are my predictions: 1: Never has enough userbase to become sustainable. Very likely given that a search engine costing as much as a hulu account is not a value proposition and Kagi folds after a few years. 2: Kagi gets bought out by a larger brand and takes on the hulu platform of pay + ads. 3: Kagi gets enough of a userbase to get recognition, so advertisers and companies start targeting and optimizing their sites for that service so that they can get a share of a crowd that will pay to search the internet, eventually turning them into what Google is now. 4: Companies invest into Kagi, buying a premium subscription to enable the search functionality on their own systems. Soon after the companies realize they are covering a significant portion of their income streams and start blackmailing Kagi to change their business model so that their userbase is preferentially directed towards the controlling companies' products. 5: Kagi gets investors who do what the companies in 4 would do. 6: Cheaper competitors arrive and the paid search engine concept goes into a death spiral race to the bottom, destroying the field for everyone. (I can get the same results as Kagi on "Gluffer" for $0.99/month and the first 6 months are free! etc., etc.) There's very little chance that they make it past all of these hurdles. It would require a creator/owner with amazing self-discipline and an absolute corporate credo to force them to turn away money (all the way up to bankruptcy and the end of the business) in favor of the people that use their products. Sometimes when returning results, the page shifts down after a few seconds because a top result is refined with sub links. By that time I already moved to click on a link somewhere in the results, and the page shift makes me click on the wrong link. Blacklisting those github/stackoverflow mirrors If you use uBlock Origin, this filter list should help: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter Not filling the top hits with shopping links? I switched to brave search, it just works like google, no problems Better technical searches is why I've been trying you.com Google shutting down their search business.