Alternative search engines to Google? | Hacker News Reader

Alternative search engines to Google?

3 pointstrailfox7 comments

What are the best search engine alternatives to Google? I've tried various options including DDG, Bing (was trying to keep an open mind...) and most recently Yandex. Of the three I've found Yandex to give the best result for my purposes. Which search engines have you tried, and which one(s) gave you the best results?

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May I ask what you did not like about Bing? I've found Google's results better in the past, but Bing certainly to be competent and in some instances superior. There's duckduckgo but my experience has been that its index is simply too small for some requests, although it's been a while since I last used it. Its emphasis on privacy is nice though.

The search results of Bing seemed very similar to DDG. It seemed to do a mediocre job if figuring out the context of my search. Google seemed to figure out the question behind my query. With Bing the results seemed to feel more like a regular text search where it matched the words I was searching for to semi-random websites. Perhaps google has so much search traffic and they check which links people click on for different searches, so they are able to adapt to put more useful results closer to the top for a given query over time.

Interesting, what are some example queries that we can try on the Bing vs Google challenge that will highlight this? (http://www.bingiton.com)

It was a few months ago so I can't remember the queries. I tried a few to compare now and didn't notice much difference between the two with the examples I tested with.

I like https://startpage.com Google results without Google tracking.

The disadvantage: You're still funding Google b/c StartPage sells their ads.

you can try Baidu.com-a chinese search engine. It is mostly used in China and Japan. The most interesting thing about this search engine is that it is the second most usable search engine according to alexa database.

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