@mangeurdenuage Is #Qwant really that pervasive? #Google got to be so big because its results were better than existing search providers. Yahoo used to be close (even with a Bing backend) and #DuckDuckGo was even closer (with Bing, #Yandex, and others), but lately, using a non-G search results in just going back to G.
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The deep secret among search providers is that the "B" in #Bing stands for "broken". Despite 20+ years of Microsoft pouring money into search, its results are usually comparable in their awfulness with #Ask.
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#Seeks & #Searx can get decent results when they're set to use Google as their provider, but if an instance gets popular, it will hit its API limit.
@ajroach42 I don't think there is a good and concise write-up about #Searx. You're probably best served by trying out a few Searx instances and reading the short description on https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
@blort @johnnynull I noticed years ago that #DDG’s results differ from #Yahoo’s, which differ from #Bing’s. Non-bubbling may be part of it, but it doesn’t explain the sharply different results (or at least sort order of the results) between the Bing and Yahoo.
It doesn’t surprise me that #Startpage’s results differ from #Google’s, even beyond the filter bubble.
As for which to use, I use a variety, including Startpage, but the main one is determined mainly by quality of results, and Startpage’s results are generally inferior to #DuckDuckGo and to #Searx & #Seeks (but far superior to #YaCy or the abysmal results that #Ask gives).
@geniusmusing #DDG is my primary search engine. #YaCy is my secondary. I still end up switching to #StartPage / #Google / #Seeks for 2 or 3 out of 10 searches because search results aren’t satisfactory.
@sim I threw "searx" into http://search.yacy.net/ and got a page full of links to other #Searx instances. There are also some other #YaCy and #Seeks instances out there.