Fun With Search Engines
I keep seeing these articles everywhere now about how Google results are getting SO MUCH worse. So terrible! So many splogs! I stopped using Google as my primary search engine a long time ago, in favor of DuckDuckGo -- more because I don't like Google's invasiveness and spying than anything else -- but I do occasionally go back to Google when DuckDuckGo fails me. And to be honest, I can't say that I've noticed what other people complain about, at least not so dramatically (though I do agree that searches that used to succeed, like for exact long quotes, no longer do).
There's a lot of possible reasons for this. I might just be a slowly boiling frog, and haven't realized it yet. I might have learned to unconsciously and automatically skim past junk results (I find I often skip right over the top result). I'm never logged into Google. I always clear my cookies and cache when I log out of my brower. I use uBlock Origin. It might just be the kind of stuff I search for, or the way I query. Who knows?
But I from all these articles, and the associated comment threads, I've found a lot of alternative search engines, and I tried a few. I've started using Startpage as my Google proxy, for more anonymity. I've found that the results are not the same as directly querying Google, but they are pretty good and sometimes better (less sploggy, even). DuckDuckGo and Startpage/Google are still my go-tos, but I've added a few more back-up engines, too:
- Mojeek has its own search index. sierdy called this the best alternative to the Google-Bing-Yandex index trifecta. I'd call it good, not great. Seems to surface mostly older pages (which can be useful sometimes). Has advanced search (remember that?), and a beta-version Substack specific search engine, which I haven't tried. Less good for what's the answer?, better for what else is out there?
- Marginalia is maybe more interesting than "useful," depending on why you are browsing. It focuses on indexing the "small web," and as the developer says:
It’s perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there. Instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn’t even know you were looking for.
It's another what else is out there? kind of search engine, and while I don't lean on it much, I always click through to it (Firefox makes it easy to cycle a query through multiple search engines), just to see what's there.
The same developer made a Similar Website Finder which is also kind of fun. Type your own website in and see what it suggests!
Oh, and by the way, sierdy's page of alternative search indexes that I link to above is quite informative and interesting. Do check it out.