Alternative search engines to Google?

Considering Neeva. Supposed to be much more private a d secure (although there is a small fee).
If interested listen to a recent interview with the CEO on the Sway podcast with Kara Swisher. Pretty interesting. If I do sign up, I’ll report back at some point
 
I generally use Bing. Because they pay me to search and it works well enough.

A few times I couldn't find what I wanted to I used one of the other engines for that search to see if I had better luck.

I generally earn ~$75 / yr from Bing, so we are not talking much money.
 
I generally use Bing. Because they pay me to search and it works well enough.

A few times I couldn't find what I wanted to I used one of the other engines for that search to see if I had better luck.

I generally earn ~$75 / yr from Bing, so we are not talking much money.

I didn't know about this program because Google probably stuffed the Microsoft Rewards program so far down on any search I've done that I missed it. And I'm not joking.
 
I generally use Bing. Because they pay me to search and it works well enough.

A few times I couldn't find what I wanted to I used one of the other engines for that search to see if I had better luck.

I generally earn ~$75 / yr from Bing, so we are not talking much money.

Well that is tempting. I will check out Bing with some search comparisons.

I see there is a Firefox extension for Bing.
 
So I'm activating this thread once again. I reactivated it earlier this year because I was frustrated by sudden low quality Google searches.

Lo and behold, it turns out right about that time a lot of people were complaining. This writer from The Atlantic has a piece about it. It isn't all one-sided bitching about Google, the author also digs a deeper and gives the other side of why search has changed.

It is worth a quick read:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/google-search-algorithm-internet/661325/

A few weeks ago my house had a septic-tank emergency, which is as awful as it sounds. As unspeakable things began to burble up from my shower drain, I did what any smartphone-dependent person would: I frantically Googled something along the lines of poop coming from shower drain bad what to do. I was met with a slew of cookie-cutter websites, most of which appeared hastily generated and were choked with enough repetitive buzzwords as to be barely readable. Virtually everything I found was unhelpful, so we did the old-fashioned thing and called a professional. The emergency came and went, but I kept thinking about those middling search results—how they typified a zombified internet wasteland.
 
Interesting that the article cites searching for a professional service. When we needed our carpets cleaned I searched for "[our suburb] carpet cleaning" and came up with a business with that exact name....but it turned out to have a fake address (I know our suburb very well, they used the address of a business I had actually been to before), and the phone number went to a very generalized call center. There were multiple reviews that said one guy showed up in a car with a rented carpet cleaner like you can get in many grocery stores, and I assume they have hundreds of other fake names, so the scale of this scam is hard to measure. (For reference, our named suburb has a population of about 30K.)

While I don't mean to distract from the changes in search engines, I wonder how much of the change we're seeing is due to this kind of businesses aggregation finding more effective ways to game search engines, for example by creating fake "local" businesses that only a local could know are not legit.
 
While I don't mean to distract from the changes in search engines, I wonder how much of the change we're seeing is due to this kind of businesses aggregation finding more effective ways to game search engines, for example by creating fake "local" businesses that only a local could know are not legit.

Oh yes, we probably have all seen this!

Search for "roofing" from your Springfield address, and magically you get a website at the top of the list that says: "We do roofing in Springfield"

Then you dig further and notice the business is based in Champaign, not Springfield. Digging further, you notice the website language looks suspiciously like the roofer in San Jose, California, 1500 miles away. Hmmm...

The article addresses it a bit in the interview with the soul crushed writer who worked for an SEO company creating manufactured blog posts.
 
Oh yes, we probably have all seen this!

Search for "roofing" from your Springfield address, and magically you get a website at the top of the list that says: "We do roofing in Springfield"

Then you dig further and notice the business is based in Champaign, not Springfield. Digging further, you notice the website language looks suspiciously like the roofer in San Jose, California, 1500 miles away. Hmmm...

The article addresses it a bit in the interview with the soul crushed writer who worked for an SEO company creating manufactured blog posts.

Generally if I have no references from friends I will go to Yelp. Then do comparison shopping.
 
I like the Brave browser. It seems as good as Google to me and it filters out the annoying ads in articles. It’s also privacy oriented. I think you have to get it n app form.

Duck, Duck, Go is no longer private, unfortunately.
 
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