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Discussion on: Google alternatives?

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patricktingen profile image
Patrick Tingen

For a while now I am using startpage.com/ as search page. It is essentially a shell around google, thus giving you the google results (albeit non-personalised) while not giving away data to Google. You might want to give it a try

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ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke

Thanks @patricktingen ! I should probably also add metaGer which combines results from more than one search engine.
Does anyone have a source where DuckDuckGo fetch their results? Meta or just Google as well?

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valeriavg profile image
Valeria

According to wiki:

DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[53] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.[3][53][54][55] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.[55][56]

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melvyn_sopacua_afcf30b58a profile image
Melvyn Sopacua

And yet, primary results are Bing. On the shopping tab you may even find ads now. I was like ... the hell? and worked that feedback button.

But most annoyingly, you can't do precise searches, even when quoting things, it always tries to think for you and assume you mean something else as well, and then doesn't actually find the thing you are looking for and even puts in results (and lots of them) where your words aren't even on the page, the source or even the backend code if you could read it.

The only one that - aside from privacy - really did a good job providing relevant results and had it's own index, was Cliqz, which unfortunately had to fold due to changing priorities.

There's also Qwant, but again, Bing powered and I gave up using it, because performance was abysmal. Perhaps that has changed.