Binging it on: putting an end to the Google bias | Hacker News Reader

Binging it on: putting an end to the Google bias

antonpug.com

7 pointsantonpug14 comments

Am I the only one who finds it depressing that the main alternative to Google is Microsoft?

Why couldn't there be a search engine run by a non-profit, which does not treat its users like commodities, which respects its users' privacy, does not track them, does not advertise, and is run for the benefit of its users, not for its own benefit?

Um, and how is that sustainable to the high volume a search engine is put under; without a way to pay for itself?

I'd be happy to contribute money to such an entity.

In the wake of the recent search-engine and web-service provider scandals, I think a lot of people would.

Putting an end to the Google bias by introducing the Bing bias. Waste of time.

Just switch to duckduckgo already. You don't need either of the mentioned search engines. I switched completely a couple of weeks ago and I haven't had a problem searching for _anything_.

I have a hard time seeing what people think Google does so magically that they see duckduckgo (or any alternative, really) failing at. You either get what you search for or you don't. On top of that you can get to a result more easily by using !bang stuff on duckduckgo.

I've tried repeatedly. For technical searches, I often cannot find what I'm looking for and have to return to Google.

Fair enough. About 3/4 of my searches are purely technical searches done when I'm programming (in what I'd say is a fringe language (Racket)) so I guess I'm just getting lucky with documentation and whatnot.

The very few times I have to depart from ddg I'll just use the bang search and go "!g whatever" and be done with it, honestly. Most of the time, for reference checks I'll just go "!racket library/function" and get what I need instantly.

(This works for a surprising amount of internal site searches, which I think is really impressive.)

Can we drop this DuckDuckGo advertisement posts already? People who follows HN knows what DuckDuckGo is thanks to endless streaming of posts. We get it, a Bing facade with a promise of Privacy.

I don't follow HN enough to recognize "an endless streaming of [duckduckgo] posts". Regardless, as a user I will happily inform people about what I see as an alternative to Google.

I'd do the same for xmonad (or tiling window managers in general) in a conversation that related to that. Because good software deserves mention.

If you don't want to see discussions about search engines then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't view the comments for links that pertain to that certain topic. It seems fairly idiotic of you to even begin complaining about this, honestly.

I agree with gnosis...it is depressing. I guess the point I was trying to make is that Google is not the only player in this game, and from a dev perspective, it's important to pay attention to Bing and optimize your SEO for Bing as well. From a consumer's perspective, given the two choices - I think people would see some advantages from Bing. But I agree - it would be amazing to have a non-profit search engine, something ran by Mozilla maybe..

Why would Mozilla do that when a large chuck of their funding comes from Google?

The article doesn't mention any measures to escape particular search engine bubbles. It seems unfair to make a comparison without doing that first.

I'm more interested in projects like blind search (http://blindsearch.fejus.com/)

That's a nice site - if you just want to compare the search algorithms. (I chose Bing) But today for most people search results are more than just pure ordering of links - people want integration, people want easy-click access to content and social media. I realize that's not the case for everyone, but for a lot of users, these features matter, so stripping them away does not do the search engines true justice

The good news is there is http://yacy.net/en/index.html

It's a peer to peer search engine without any of the privacy problems that come with using Google or, god forbid, bing.

The bad news is that it requires some effort and dedication from its users. Hopefully recent events will convince more people to give it a try.

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