Ask HN: Are alternative search engines good enough for me to replace Google?

6 points·hoodoof··9 comments

I'm thinking of switching from Google.com for my searching.

Does anyone have any feedback on how effective the competition is?

DuckDuckGo would be my recommendation. It is "good enough" for general searching, but I still have to use Google at work to find technical things slightly faster.

Yes DuckDuckGo is really a good option. Also Bing from Microsoft is pretty good these days despite the bad reputation.

Yeah, DuckDuckGo is great. Actually, it's sometimes smarter than Google the way it displays information directly on the site (e.g. the definition of a word)

Switched to DDG a few weeks back and can't see me going back to Google

I had tried this a while back, and found it depends on what you're searching.

For technical topics, I had found bing had a preference towards the articles from the microsoft developer network. It also had a bias towards MS technologies.

For example, looking for something vague like real time web server, bing gave a couple results from asp.net pages on the front page, while google seemed more balanced. Google had one link to NodeJS while bing had none.

You could experiment this yourself. I sometimes keep different tabs with different search engines and pick what I like best.

Bing is normally fine.

When I use Google, I use http://startpage.com

It's easy enough to try, why don't you give it a go and see for yourself.

If Google search works for you - why replace it? just curious..

It feels to me like Google results are the outcomes of SEO.

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