Ask HN: What search engines do you use besides Google? Why? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What search engines do you use besides Google? Why?

6 pointstokenadult6 comments

I just did a search of previous threads here, after a day of looking up information in search engines other than Google. My try-out of other search engines came after trying Bing for a search, and seeing Bing invite me to take its challenge of comparing its search results to Google's. (For all five of the searches I tried, I preferred Google's results.) I tried a bunch of other search engines, including some I hadn't tried for years, once that got me curious.

What do you think? Do you regularly use a search engine other than Google? Why do you like it? What does it do better than Google? What's a good search engine to use regularly for looking up varied information?

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I'll occasionally use Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/) for well defined searches for example "countries by population". For stuff like that it's awesome.

I use DuckDuckGo - http://duckduckgo.com - which has some nice features such as distinguishing between different meanings of a search term as well as respecting user privacy.

This following link, is a google image search for Tomorrowbook a search engine I developed. Even when Tomorrowbook was live and I was trying to make a conscientious effort to use it instead of Google, by instinct I would go to Google first.

As the example searches for "obama" and "news" show, the results were displayed as favicons/custom logos only. Tomorrowbook was developed with both the Google and Bing API, but the link only shows the Bing version.

If you like the "Google results" there are a lot of search engines running the Google API, so will get the same results but a different display and/or UI and/or UX. Aside from tomorrowbook, blackle.com (energy saving google) is one I remember - funny enough it was always hard to find search engine using the google api using Google but you will run into some interesting ones, I think one way I found a bunch was searching "best search engines for kids".

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=i...

Mainly, one could say I switch back and forth between Bing and Google as their results degrade into customized marketing - at least on my desktop. My phone is nearly all Bing.

But after discovering Blekko here on HN by reading Chuck McManus's profile it's gaining traction in the rotation.

Finally, on my desktop, I use Wikipedia a lot for searches - prefix "w" in searches, and it shouldn't be dismissed as a search engine.

Yandex has a large index. They used to have a simple UI but recent updates make it look like it's from 2009. DuckDuckGo bothers me in that it just aggregates other engines.

DuckDuckGo has its own bot: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

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