What is going on with search engines these days?

1

Swisscows

DuckDuckGo & Co. - DDG, Swisscows and Ecosia all use Bing index. For people that only care about privacy, this is a non-issue. But I don't like the idea that the entirety of web currently depends on just two companies. So I personally don't use them. Same logic extends to Startpage, which is owned by an ad company & uses Google's results. As they rely on the Big 2, they're closer to frontends/MetaSearch engines in behavior.

#Private Search Engine #Search Engine #Internet Search 36 social mentions

2

Brave Search

Brave - Developed by a company led by the person that conceived Javascript while at Mozilla and is now behind the Brave browser. The Brave search service has its own crawler and index. But users also have the option to optimize results against Google's index. A red flag to me personally is that Brave's monetization relies on advertisements. That being said, I've had a pleasant experience with the search results even with Google optimization turned off. They feel far ahead of the competition (sans Kagi). I use it a lot despite the red flag that I mentioned, mainly because I'm not a fan of the web needing to rely only on Google and Microsoft indexes.

#Android #iPhone #Web App 328 social mentions

3

Kagi

Kagi - Another premium search engine that also has its own crawler and index. Developers are the very folks that created the Orion Browser on iOS. A technically competent team that pioneered a feature called ''lenses'' which was in-turn adopted and popularized by Brave under the name of "Goggles". They claim to be privacy focused but their search service requires an account. Meaning you'd need to trust them to not form a graph using your search queries. The level faith to be put in them is to high for my taste, so I avoid it. If Kagi didn't need an account, I'd have set it as my daily driver search engine instead of Brave.

#Search Engine #Security & Privacy #Privacy Search Engine 120 social mentions

4

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo & Co. - DDG, Swisscows and Ecosia all use Bing index. For people that only care about privacy, this is a non-issue. But I don't like the idea that the entirety of web currently depends on just two companies. So I personally don't use them. Same logic extends to Startpage, which is owned by an ad company & uses Google's results. As they rely on the Big 2, they're closer to frontends/MetaSearch engines in behavior.

#Search Engine #Web Search #Internet Search 1669 social mentions

5

Whoogle Search

#Search Engine #iPhone #Internet Search 63 social mentions

6

Andi

I understand. I recently searched for the exact same thing on several search engines and found virtually no differences. I do like the Bing layout for results and wish the true alternatives with their own bots would change the layouts to be pleasing and easy to quickly pick the site that matches what I want, without all the listcicles. I also found this new one that is pleasing and has different layout options, while being privacy-focused: andisearch.com. A team of hackernews is developing the engine. Another source of info: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/#general-indexing-search-engines.

#Productivity #Privacy #AI 24 social mentions