Beyond Google: The Other Search Engines - Comments Page 1

Until Google stops filling many of the first search pages with multiple line entries from companies especially those that will be checked by people who have been victims or trying to check the veracity of their advertisements and whom I suspect are paying for the priviledge to scam the Public - Google Search Engine is not worth a jot! ALSO - how many readers like me ask what the hell has this entry (whatever it is) to do with the search enquiry
actually made?

Gave up Google. Tired of their amassing data on everything I say and do. Switched to
Duck Duck Go. Very satisfied and they don't farm my searches to exploit for profit

I like Metacrawler, it aggregates multiple search engine results at once.

I have been a big fan of Bing since its inception. I find the results more accurate and more relevant. It frequently brings up very good "hits" that Google doesn't seem to find. I also find it seems to be easier to get what I am looking for without so many refinements to the search terms.

With Google I frequently get a lot of "hits" that are not even close to what I am looking far.

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo because I kept finding the first, sometimes PAGES of references marked AD =Advertisement and NOT what I was searching for. DuckDuckGo has maybe one AD and the rest are usually ad-free. MyOwnExperience

DuckDuckGo showed improper ads, so I stick with Google. But from one comment I might try Bing.

I've been using Startpage since it was Ixquick. I like that it has an advanced search page that you can enable that looks just like Google Advanced but which does not track you nor serve up ads. It's easy to add to browsers except Chrome (thought it's possible) so you can use it as your default. I've got no issues with it at all. Nor the searches it returns. I like DuckDuckgo too but wish it had an advanced search feature.

Tried others (including Bing that Microsoft keeps trying to stuff down our throats) and have never found any that gave nearly as many relevant answers. Bing seems to be especially poor and getting me what I want.

Would never even try one that is based in a government that tracks everything - Russia and China.

For someone to whom grammar is important, your comment about Wolfram Alpha is interesting:
"Although it's volume is comparatively small ..."
("it's" means "it is" or "it has")

StartPage seems to agree with me as it provides me the *placebo anonymity, *lack of ads, *2-click capability to refine searches based on date (past day/week/month/year) and all this without having to log-in to some google account.

American English Grammar: It's a whole mess and I see that it's gotten to be a whole bigger mess, since 'someone' has decided that "it has" has been shortened to be the same as "it is"! Was that your idea @BillPfeifer?

My problem with Google has far less to do with Privacy and lots to do with their dishonest and unscrupulous gross bias. Their results are dishonest, biased and slanted and therefor inaccurate.

If you want a far left globalist slant on search, by all means use Google. If you want to be constantly pushed towards Democrat Party views, policies and propaganda with every search result, use Google. If you want to start on the 2nd, 3rd or 100th search page to start trying to winnow out objective results, use Google.

Unfortunately, they have such a complete and total market dominance and since many (if not most) of their competitors simply repackage their search results, I am not sure they can be avoided. If ever a company (even more than Microsoft in the 1980's & '90's) required application of Anti-Trust Laws it is Google. They are the single most powerful propagandist in the history of the world and unfortunately for the rest of us they are bound and determined to utilize that power in very nefarious ways.

Their motto perhaps always more accurately should have been "Do Evil", they are the definition of a bad actor. I guess if you agree with their Politics you may not mind, but for most people they are far too powerful, far too unconstrained and far too willing to harm their product to achieve their political ends.

You would think that a company that is selling access to you and your data would care enough about its putative "customers" (actually "product" would be more accurate) to care whether the Product found them to be honest, trustworthy and unbiased. However it is quite clear that they believe their power over their Product (and regulators & governments) is sufficient that they have no need to even pretend to be any of the three things mentioned or to have any compunctions about the exercise of that power to shape opinion.

Again, I wish I could offer more than simply an admonition not to trust ANY results from Google Search, but sadly, there is no known viable alternative that I am aware of and your article does not point to any.

I would add that at various times I have been hopeful that Apple would in fact release its own Search Engine and I believe they have spent a significant amount of time, resources and money trying to develop such a product. Not that Apple is not also run by Leftists, but I have found they have a much higher appreciation for their customers, for personal privacy than Google has ever shown.

Do they have their own issues and problems and do many people find their desire to control a product from beginning to end, (hardware, services and software) irritating and sometimes aggravating and limiting. Yes. But, personally I have found the trade off in dealing with a company that cares whether I am happy and satisfied with my products and which does not overtly try to make me their product (and I hope does not do so covertly).

I believe as well even the "walled garden" approach Apple takes to extremes is in their minds an attempt to provide their customers a product that works the way they believe the customer wants it to. Are they always right about that? No. But again, I would argue their intent is to make the customer experience as optimum as possible.

Cold City, just WHAT are 'improper ads'?

I have often tried Duck Duck Go, because it is the default search engine on my regular home operating system Linux Mint these days, and found it to be OK, but not great...
I can tolerate and learn to deal with Google's privacy invasion for the most part, but the one thing that really annoys the hell out of me, is their insistence on going to a local version (google.co.il) and local language by default, as I live outside the USA (in Israel). Sometimes it is very difficult to find the link to return to Google.com or to an English interface. Why can't google respect the fact that my entire computer is set to English as the working language, or that I prefer to search on Google.com, or at least in an international mode? Why can't it present the local modes as an option instead of forcing it upon me by default according to my IP address?In my mind, google has become a bully, just like Microsoft's approach until recently...

jim

read 'olamoree'
immediately above 'Cold City'

Bob, you neglected to mention www.qwant.com, which I believe you tipped we subscribers to many posts in the past. I use it exclusively and am happy, and best of all completely private, including no tracking or ads.

Granville - You beat me to the punch! Almost every search on Google is liberal, leftist and one-sided. It promotes the globalist agenda, literally "in your face" with their biased views. Just try some image searches like American Inventors. What bothers me is that school children use mainly Google searches for their studies.
Be very cautious about Wikipedia as well. Looking up some topics on that online encyclopedia made my blood pressure soar. Encyclopedia Britannia, which prides itself on being fact checked and unbiased (no agenda) is a much better and honest source.
There's no rating system here, but your post would get 10 stars.
I applaud Bob for giving alternative search sources. Perhaps one may find better and more truthful search results for interests that go beyond shopping, in which case almost any of them will do.

I have just done a search under "google firing software engineer" on Duck Duck Go and under Google. Google carries on a high position entries that use words critical of the memo written by software engineer James Damore and that got him fired. One source said Damore claimed women are high in "neuroticism" while the original memo explained the word's meaning by saying women are higher in anxiety.
The very fact that Damore was fired for releasing his blog posting (hardly rises to the level of a "manifesto," does it?) gives evidence supporting his point that certain viewpoints are considered "bad" and should not be discussed within Google. At the same time Damore encouraged conditions that provided for psychological safety, i.e. the freedom to express oneself without fear of retribution. He pointed out some of Google's biases and freely admitted his own as that of a classical liberal (which I interpret as meaning "libertarian").
Meanwhile Google's new VP who seems to be in charge of diversity and lack of bias, admitted free expression should prevail within Google, BUT not the ideas presented by Damore, and she explicitly declined to include a link in her statement that would make it easy to refer to Damore's posting so that readers could see for themselves what Damore actually said, and in context.
Her posting, and Google's summary firing of Damore for a blog posting disagreeing with aspects of Google's culture tells me all I need to know about Google and why it is ideologically "purer" to deal preferentially with its competitors.
The Duck is my choice for a search engine. Its (not "it's") choice of search results for the Damore firing showed far less bias. Thus does politics show its ugly head in something that should be as straight-forqward as search results.
And Damore's firing revealed something ominous.
There was a comedy sketch with Carl Reiner interviewing Mel Brooks in which Brooks was playing a young citizen of the post-WW II "New Germany," and asked where would all these new policies, if enacted, lead.
The answer (as if it was obvious, German accent):
"To ze final solution of ze Nazi problem."
The lesson that should be learned:
If you have found principles that you consider to be "good," well, that's great. But don't kill (or fire) people who disagree with you. Or just raise and ask for calm rational discussion about aspects of the "truth" you think you have discovered.
And if you dislike "bad" speech, please realize that attempts to stamp out calm, rational discussion about potential problems in the existing idea structure is itself "bad."
It is not OK to support free speech only for ideas you agree with. Which is what Google seems to be doing, and it also seems to be influencing its (not "it's") search choices.
If the real Nazis are not free to march peaceably and express their views, no matter how repugnant, that reflects very poorly on your ideas of openness, democracy, lack of bias and even-handedness.
Ironically, especially for any Vice-president of
lack of bias and even-handedness.

My problem with Google is not with any privacy issues, but rather with the very obviously politically-motivated elevation of some search results and suppression of others. They don't even try to hide their support of leftist causes/parties/candidates and disdain for others any more.

@Bill Pfeiffer, @RandiO
That's because both phrases ("it is" and "it has") get elided to the same sounds in normal speech-- we're stuck with either using the same contraction for both or changing one (and I don't see a good way to do that).