I recommend Bing.
The thing that you almost forget after using Google forever is that they can always pull up relevant links to what you want, even from ancient forum posts if it's a really esoteric issue that only 5 people have ever had.
DuckDuckGo is decent, but it's no where near Google in that capability. Blekko not even close to DDG. (I have been using Blekko for my default search engine for a week or two now, but I almost always have to revert back to Google, except for really obvious results that I could probably pull up without a search engine entirely. I feel bad saying it, but it really isn't that good. Hopefully they keep working on it, though. )
Bing, on the other hand, was almost neck and neck with Google; it was only very occasionally that I would revert back to Google, and I used Bing for perhaps a month. I theorize that this is because Bing has millions (billions?) of Microsoft dollars behind it, way more than any other competing search engine.
I think I'm going to go back to DDG for a bit. I only used it a few months ago; I'm interested to see if it's gotten better.
Some people have had success with crawl-delay, though there are occasional reports of MSNbot not honoring that either.
I lasted a few weeks, and would occasionally go back to Google when I wasn't satisfied with how a search turned out.
A few times I wanted to switch back to Google, but I couldn't justify it rationally to myself.
Around that time I bought a new laptop and used it to work away from home for a few days. I hadn't bothered to switch my default search engine away from Google. At some point, it dawned on me how happy I was to be back.
When I got home I promptly ended my experiment and have been back on Google ever since.
I will say that I didn't hate Bing or anything. If for some reason I was forced to use Bing instead of Google for now and ever after I'd probably be slightly bummed, but not much more than that.
In fact, more's the pity. Microsoft is quite capable of producing great and standards-compliant software, and they often deliberately choose not to do this.
Stop thinking about corporations in terms of 'evil' and 'good'. Start thinking about whether their interests are aligned with yours.
Google was 'good' for many years because their growth required an open, standards-compliant internet. That period is ending.
You're definitely right about that. That's why I commented on Microsoft's attempt to play nice. It's also why I'm concerned about the new face of Google. The more we punish/reward companies based on their actions the more their actions will begin to suit us.
"Stop thinking about corporations in terms of 'evil' and 'good'"
No. If enough people start "thinking about corporations in terms of 'evil' and 'good'" then evil will fail. Capitalism is about getting people what they want and rewarding the people who made it happen. We just need to make sure that less technically inclined people also want "good".
Maybe an online PDF/PPT viewer would be nice also for links that lead to those files.
I've switched to it for most of my ad hoc searching. Occasionally I use Google still for some things.
I also though have 4 separate google accounts for email, which I can't really get away from. Well I guess I could but I probably won't for a while.
(been using DDG for search for about 6 months now, rarely if ever get better results on google)
I'd wager that an address that is bot-scrapable would soon see dozens of spam messages a day, if not much more.
I switched a month or 2 ago, and I've been very happy. And if I search for something and don't like the results, I hit / (the keyboard shortcut to select the text of the search box), hit right-arrow (to get my cursor to the end of the search box), add a "!g" to the end, and hit enter. And then I usually find that google's results are just as bad :)
You can now do /+search, e.g. /slashdot or whatever. Also all the !bang commands now will take you right to the site if you don't follow them with a search, e.g. !a takes you to amazon.
Image search: ? Devilfinder can be useful, sometimes, but mostly gives NSFW results.
Voice: ? Voxox is such a bloated piece of software, but also offers Fax (when will it die? please?)
Mail: oh there are plenty of alternatives, none half as good. Then again, I'm a proud mutt user ;)
Calendar: Airset? Nah, only desktop apps compare.
Reader: I guess I'll go back to my Sage Firefox plugin.
Browser: Opera or Firefox. But to run Webkit on Linux what? Midori? that crashes every other page load.
Chromium, Konqueror, and uzbl come to mind. There are probably a few others from this list that might be interesting to you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-bas...
Search: Bing (This is my default search engine); Maps: Bing (Their Bird's Eye is way cooler than Google Maps); Gmail, Calendar: Zoho Mail & Calendar; Docs & Apps: Zoho Docs & Business; Voice: YouMail.com; Translate: MicrosoftTranslator.com; Sites: Weebly; Finance: Y! Finance; YouTube: Blip.tv, Viddler, Vimeo; Photos: Flickr; Browser: Firefox/Safari
I still recommend google for things such as technological search. For the majority of tail queries google still does better.
DuckDuckGo on the other hand is a nice search engine. However, it is objectively not as good at finding results as the other too. You can use statistical measures with RMSE and human rated errors to measure the accuracy of the machine learning and results pages that turn up in a search engine. DuckDuckGo is not even on the radar for google or microsoft because its core product--search--isn't even on the same level as the other two.
Heck, if Gabriel started charging users for the service, I would gladly pay him.
Whether it's IBM's laser/light data transfer technology (http://www.pcworld.com/article/202018/intel_turns_to_light_t...) or something we haven't even seen yet, the power of innovation will make the net neutrality argument (almost) irrelevant.
You should choose the product that best fits your needs. Also, do you really think Microsoft is less 'evil' than Google? I'm driven crazy every day by Microsoft products and their business practices!
Both Microsoft and Google are too big to be given a blanket judgment of "evil" or "good". There are so many people, projects, locations, etc. involved that it's probably more constructive to talk about specific products or policies that you do/don't like.
For example, here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Microsoft has opened their New England Research & Development Center. They've opened up their private office space to tons of public tech meetings (JavaScript meetups, web design meetups, startup-related events, Ignite Boston, etc. etc.). They offer great facilities and even provide food. As a result, they're really enabling the startup and tech community here. Google also has an office here in Cambridge, but I can't think of anything that they're doing here to help startups.
So is Microsoft good and Google evil because of this? It's just one glimpse of two vast empires...
To be fair, this page also exists, and is just as long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
That said you should probably search for inconsequential things rather than not use them at all.
Google Search on the other hand; I can use Bing or other alternatives easily without actual loss.
Don't get me wrong, my business is enmeshed with google now and I'm looking for alternatives, but if the problem is with Google's political stance on net neutrality wouldn't all these recommendations be incomplete without including a statement on the company's political stance with regards to net neutrality?
I would like to run my own servers for the above functionality but don't want the overhead of managing machines and backups. I could be interested in a package of products that runs the software in the cloud and configured to use my own domain name and stores data on my own S3/dropbox. In a perfect world it would be easy to switch providers for the various layers. I'm sure this is technically feasible today but I'm talking about an easy to use setup, ease of use being totally subjective of course.
I wouldn't necessarily object to using Google for one of the above layers or services, I just don't like one company having all of it.
Maybe the only way to get rid of google is to accept that you won't be finding things as easily any more. But that would automatically give everybody a competitive advantage over you.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the-blekk...
So far seems pretty nice, though I haven't used it that much.
The number one reason to use DDG: The developer is friendly and accessible. I don't expect you could get a personal response to a feature request or comment from Bing or Google.
Mailwise, I recently set up my own mail server, so that has let me begin phasing my GMail account out. As far as spam control goes, Bogofilter has served me extremely well for years.
Even if I find replacements for all these services online, there is also the desktop and mobile integration question. MS talks a lot about "cloud computing" but I've yet to see it from them. With Google, however, I am able to access all my data across multiple devices.
So far, Bing is kind of like the lifeboat on the good ship Google. I don't use it on a daily basis, but I'm sure glad its there.
on the front page of Ask HN
Full disclosure - I am paying like $20 per year or something for the "enhanced" service, but I don't even know what that includes any more. It used to be Outlook connectivity and more storage. I haven't used Outlook (at home) in years, and I don't think my account goes over the size of the free storage.
I've become really fond of GMail's navigation, though. Beats desktop clients, although sup[1] wasn't that bad and you could probably do a lot with Emacs MUAs…
[1]: http://www.gmx.com
> That's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you politically disagree with the company
Why would you continue to support a company whose policies you no longer support (if that was the case)?
> "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing
Can you explain a bit here?
> Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government regulations tend to not end good.
Almost any sort of "enforcing" requires government support for it to be legal. This includes property rights. So I am not sure what is the exact point here
I use tools not because I want to support a company, but because the tool is useful to me.
Things can be legal without enforcing them. For example, you can breath air without government enforcing it. Or you can switch search engine providers without government enforcement.
More important observation here is that this particular article and discussion in comments is too politically charged (my comment above got even downvoted twice already). That's a bad sign and most likely nothing good would come out from this discussion.
I guess it's about the balance. If I think that the company gains more than I do in that exchange (for example I get the data I need, but they get more money from ad views and more information to process), then they can convert that gain to introduce more policies I disagree with. If this is not in my interest, then maybe I should stop using the tool.