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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

If I'm gonna use a biased engine why use a shit one like DDG?

Which search engines are not "shit" in your estimation?

I'm not OP, but I'll weigh in:

Google - it's a really good search engine, but obviously biased and doesn't care about your privacy. I use it on my work machine.

Brave Search - I'm not sure if another service (like Bing) powers their results, but it works pretty well for my personal use cases.

I switched to Brave Search and generally am pleased. I did notice current events is somewhat lacking. I was searching one of the wildfires in NM yesterday and no dice. Otherwise for general information or more "static" type info I've been pleased.

Code / stackoverflow is also somewhat lacking on Brave Search, but I'm a big fan of the ability to do !g to redirect the request to Google (I don't care if they see that I'm trying to figure out why my build is failing c: )

I compile my own fork of FF for myself and my family for years, and i've switched us all to brave search for the same reasons as ` colordrops`.

`yegg` can do whatever he want's, I just want no part of it.

I switched to Brave Search and browser recently. It's based on chromium/Blink and feels a lot snappier than Firefox/Gecko.

I've tried Firefox a few times over the years and always switched back for the same reason - it didn't feel "snappy" and some things didn't render properly. Something has changed recently though. Both these issues appear to be completely gone. And now that I've got the Containers extension installed, it's superior to chromium in all material ways, except maybe the dev tools.

Maybe it's time to use those search bookmarklets again. When I think about it, many times I already know where the answer could be.

I guess I have thousands of bookmarks. I always search my bookmarks first, known sites second, DDG next and Google last. In both Firefox and chrome there is exclusive bookmark search within the addressbar. In FF it is * and then space.

Can you explain how an unbiased search engine would work? Sounds like a billion dollar idea tbh.

Compose an index by randomly spidering IP addresses. Return search results by randomly selecting an exact string match from the index. Rats, probably not a billion dollar idea after all!

One could reproduce a similar effect by surrounding your query with double-quotes on Google.

> Return search results by randomly selecting an exact string match from the index.

It could potentially surface results that you could not have found otherwise. A random dump of links, each one's relevance you must determine on your own. Or another way to put it: you do the ranking. Not a very fun idea to most.

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