What search engine do you use? Why?

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Humming Owl
 

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What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by Humming Owl »

Google as we all know it has now a very long story of making bad choices just because it is mad with power. When I started learning this I searched for other search engines and decided to try DuckDuckGo. At first, it wasn't very easy to adapt to a new search engine because I was so used to Google that I think I experienced some dizziness, at some point my head got better and I used DuckDuckGo like my first search engine. It showed similar results as Google but also other results Google would not display.

Recently as the news of war hitted the news sources, DuckDuckGo decided to "down-rank" some sites for "Russian dissinformation" (a very familiar sentence).



It seems like the right thing to do but it truly isn't, limiting what others can or cannot see is a way to control what you can think (sounds weird but it is how it works!). I am just tired of being shown only what others want me to see. I would like to see everything and judge the content myself.
Last edited by Humming Owl on 28 Mar 2022, 12:26, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by Humming Owl »

Given what DuckDuckGo said, Presearch and Brave Search questioned that decision --> https://reclaimthenet.org/brave-search-presearch-not-censor/

Now I use Presearch. Seems good so far! --> https://presearch.org/

I really hope those search engines are telling the truth about what they are. :)

At this point normal people can only trust what they say.

I do use Google and DuckDuckGo if I don't find what I want in Presearch. :lol:
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Re: What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by ArcticFoxie »

I just stick with Google.
I believe they ALL "track" us so I feel like a dog chasing my own tail if I try to bend over backwards in the "guise" of "privacy".
I do limit my searches to browser sessions where I am not logged in to anything and clear browser and cache with every session exit.
I also prevent any-and-all connections to gstatic, adservice.google, googletagmanager, google-analytics, any-and-all Google font servers, et cetera.

I subscribe to the notion that I am but a "needle in a haystack" to a company like Google with "billions" of users.
But that I "stand out like a sore thumb" to a company with only "thousands" of users.
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Re: What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by mina7601 »

I use Google, because not only it's my default search engine, but also I am used to it.

I tried Bing, and it provides inaccurate search results, which is the main reason I use Google.
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Re: What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by Win10-Hater »

Sometimes Google and sometimes DDG, because both provide accurate search results.
I just tried Presearch and it works well for me.
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Re: What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by Bird »

Google is too powerful and therefore not allowed to pass into my home network. A dnsmasq firewall will catch any communication.

So visitors run into this when they want to search something on the web using Google. "What's Google?" I ask then. "Look, that doesn't seem to exist here!"

Always a great way to start a talk about search engines.

Duckduckgo isn't without flaws, like depending on other search indexes and running on Amazon servers. But their light version is very efficent and most importantly doesn't depend on Javascript, so I use Duckduckgo Lite mostly. (https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/)

Wikipedia too. Most researches will be satisfied there (despite Wikipedia being politically biased). Wiby for fun searching on old-style websites. And Swisscows and Startpage on newer computers, when Duckduckgo doesn't seem to do the job properly. Of course Google has the best search results... but it's an evil company!
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Re: What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by Humming Owl »

Duckduckgo isn't without flaws, like depending on other search indexes and running on Amazon servers. But their light version is very efficent and most importantly doesn't depend on Javascript, so I use Duckduckgo Lite mostly. (https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/)
I didn't knew there was a lite version of DDG, It's awesome! It should be a feature of all search engines at this time.
Of course Google has the best search results... but it's an evil company!
With Google being evil I just remembered this :lol:

https://c.tenor.com/hzHwvQE-PaUAAAAC/evil-spongebob.gif
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Re: What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by Bird »

@Humming Owl: The power of message boards. And you didn't even ask for this information!

It's just like that round superhero from Spongebob says. Listen, propaganda works this way: Tell it 1000 times then they belive it. Unfortuneatly the response to "Google is evil" is then: Yeah, but I get digitally mistreated by this company already and that one too... and so Google, ah well, just another one. And I still stand on my two legs, so whatever.

People really tolerate too much digital mistreatment from evil companies!
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Re: What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by ArcticFoxie »

Bird wrote: 01 Apr 2022, 17:05 People really tolerate too much digital mistreatment from evil companies!
2.9 *Billion* monthly active Facebook users as of Q4 2021.
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Re: What search engine do you use? Why?

Post by Trev-MUN »

Although DuckDuckGo's starting to leave a real bad taste in my mouth given some of their recent decisions, for now I've still been using them over Google in most cases. With Brave implementing its own search engine any browser can use, I've been trying to make more use of that, but Brave doesn't allow you to view YouTube videos right there in the search results like DuckDuckGo does. Often I can avoid a lot of the annoying cruft associated with YouTube that way.

... when DuckDuckGo cooperates, at least. In recent years I've noticed that the search engine almost seems to make a point of NOT letting you see any videos on the topic you're trying to search, even if you explicitly search for the title of a specific video. It's weird. If Brave had the ability to play videos right from the search results, I'd be switching to that right now.
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