Best Search Engines to use

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scotland
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Joined: April 7th, 2015, 7:33 pm

Best Search Engines to use

Postby scotland » March 17th, 2018, 11:12 am

I am really starting to hate Google. I had been using Bing, and the whole MSN experience is incredibly annoying. So, I swithed back to Google. Now, when I put in a search, not only are the top 4 results ads, but so are the bottom 4 results on that page.

What are the search engines you use? Do you use different ones if you are searching for a product to buy instead of just looking for information?

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pacman000
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Joined: December 30th, 2015, 9:04 am

Re: Best Search Engines to use

Postby pacman000 » March 17th, 2018, 11:32 am

Restricted to decent search engines:

I used to use ScrubTheWeb a lot, but they closed last year and became a directory. If you're interested in directories, I'd suggest Curlie, a successor to DMOZ.

I use Gigablast fairly often, but usually the results are only OK. The engine has links to Google, Bing, and Yandex tho, so you can re-run the query on those engines. Gigablast does have fairly good support for advanced queries, which Google seems to have given up on.

Yandex is a Russian search engine with an English version. Popular in Russia; they're actually beating Google over there.

Qwant is a French search engine. There's an English version. It has a unique layout, but the results are kinda like Google 10-15 years ago; nice, but you'll see a ton of product listings.

Exalead's still online, but the results aren't as relevant as I'd like, and once you get past the 1st page you'll see a lot of dead links.

NorthernLight re-launched a public version of their engine, but it only searches through recent business news articles; it's meant as a tech demo.

Mojeek is a British search engine. Not great, but not bad. Returns a lot of list articles.

Entireweb is actually pretty good. Not sure if they're a metasearch engine now, but the results seem unique.

DuckDuckGo - Use them on my phone. Usually mirrors Bing or Google. They do have a crawler tho, so some results may be unique.

Thunderstone's Web Site Catalog is cool if you just want to find sites, but it has a lot of dead links and parked domains.

Apexoo is also cool, if you need sites instead of pages. Index is a bit small; usually only returns 50 sites.

Yippie seems to have their own index now. Has a conservative bias, but nice clustering.

iSeek mixes their results with Google's and provides clustering. I like their clustering a bit more that Yippie's.

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scotland
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Re: Best Search Engines to use

Postby scotland » March 17th, 2018, 2:31 pm

Thanks -

I think DuckDuckGo came up in the earlier discussion when Google removed the 'save image' button. I gave it a shot, and at least it didn't come up with sponsored ads in place of search results. I know Google has to make money, but that is over the top.

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pacman000
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Re: Best Search Engines to use

Postby pacman000 » March 17th, 2018, 2:55 pm

Yeah, I sometimes wish that Goto was a failure, & that any search engine which tried ads wound up in the same boat as OpenText's engine.

Don't mind ads per se, but the bid for placement stuff seems wrong somehow. A yearly site check fee would be better, IMO, if checked sites & regular sites were separated.

Other engines:

Bubblehunt - Returns lists of sites added/checked by volunteers.

Goto - They're back, as a volunteer edited engine like Bubblehunt. First two or three results ate user-edited lists, followed by regular web results. Not sure if they buy the regular web results, or if they've set up an actual crawler-based search engine.

AllTheInternet - Seems to have decent, unique results. Portal-like layout. Gives you the option of searching their engine or a few other major sites/engines. Also operates SearchALot, not to be confused with Search.alot, which is a browser hijacker.

Yooip - Public demo of an open source search engine. 1st page looks good, but 2nd page repeats most of the 1st page's results, as does the 3rd & 4th page.

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Stalvern
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Joined: June 18th, 2016, 7:15 pm

Re: Best Search Engines to use

Postby Stalvern » March 17th, 2018, 4:40 pm

It's been years since I last saw a sponsored Google result. Just get Adblock Plus.

I just gave Entireweb a go, and it makes me sad. It's the first engine I've seen that actually rivals Google's results, but the interface is awful - it drags its feet fetching pointless (and illegible) thumbnails for each site returned, and the wait only gets me ten results at a time. It's like wading through mud. If the site just let me scroll through a hundred text-only results per page, they'd have something really impressive, but it goes out of its way to be barely usable.

Wouldn't touch Yandex with a ten-proxy pole.

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Atarifever
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Joined: April 12th, 2015, 5:55 am

Re: Best Search Engines to use

Postby Atarifever » March 17th, 2018, 6:23 pm

I refuse to use google any more than I have to, as they have been pretty clearly making censorship and promotion choices based on a range of things (politics, money, etc.). I will not search on a site that is essentially knowingly keeping results back despite them likely being what I want to find. Not being political (well I am, but not here), just being a discerning consumer of information. It's like going to a library that removes and places items in their database based on anything other than what is actually available in the stacks. If you have a copy of "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," I don't care if you don't like it, I want to know it's there if I'm looking for it.

I've been using DuckDuckgo mainly, but also sometimes Bing for images (watch out though; Bing's default images are more often than not NSFW no matter what you look up unless you use safesearch filter).


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