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I have the same experience I feel like Google is becoming less and less useful for finding things. There have been several times where I tried to find things I'

I have the same experience I feel like Google is becoming less and less useful for finding things. There have been several times where I tried to find things I've come across before and Google was no help. However it's still the best search engine hands down. There is no way a search engine like DDG could provide better results. If Bing can't do it there is no way DDG can. It would like it if there was a comparable alternative to Google but there really isn't. I think it would be cool if some system or protocol (eg. IMAP, RSS, OStatus) came along to provide a way to create a user programmable search engine, that's decentralized but comparable to Google.

visarga 9y ago
Why do you think there is no open and free search engine? I don't think it's because of hosting costs, because a distributed search engine could be run with local hardware.
- bobajeff 9y ago
  A search engine is many things in a giant package. Most wholesale search companies have a database text/images and algorithm data that is in the terabytes if not more. They also have many servers for fast and efficient processing of queries and giving results. This database could be made freely available (see CommonCrawl) but without a datacenter big enough to store and run queries on it, it's meaningless as a "open" search engine. A distributed search engine runs into all of the scalability and quality of service problems that researchers of Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval have been trying to solve since the early days of the internet.