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Ask HN: What is an alternative to Google? Really.
Seriously, I am inclined to stop using Gooogle just because of their "Net neutrality" posture. I want to find alternatives, I know about Bing, Yahoo, but want to find out what people are using besides Goooogle
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-green/breaking-google-goes-evil_b_676021.html
- mattculbreth 16y agoWell you gotta try DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com/?t=mattc58 http://duckduckgo.com/?t=mattc58 I've switched to it for most of my ad hoc searching. Occasionally I use Google still for some things. I also though have 4 separate google accounts for email, which I can't really get away from. Well I guess I could but I probably won't for a while.
- gphil 16y agoDuckDuckGo certainly does the trick for general web search, but like you I'm really tied in to Gmail/Talk/Reader for my personal life and Google Apps for Business for my work life. Unfortunately, replacing these isn't entirely up to me at this point and I imagine a lot of people are in this boat.
- mike_h 16y agoThe only thing keeping me on gmail right now is the spam filter, which seems to be the best on the planet. Can anyone recommend an alternative filter? (been using DDG for search for about 6 months now, rarely if ever get better results on google)
- ams6110 16y agoDo you really get that much spam? I've had the same email address since 1990, I use it pretty much everywhere, and I get maybe 10 spam emails a day, with no filters.
- Pistos2 16y agoI find that extremely hard to believe. Do you have some very anomalous usage patterns, such as never using that address to register on websites, and never having it posted anywhere spider-crawlable on the Internet? I'd wager that an address that is bot-scrapable would soon see dozens of spam messages a day, if not much more.
- rufugee 16y agoI tried DDG for awhile, an honestly found the search results to be lacking compared to Google. YMMV.
- ronnoch 16y agoSeconded, plus if you do ever need to use Google, try http://scroogle.org http://scroogle.org or http://ixquick.com http://ixquick.com instead. Both anonymously scrape results from Google and don't keep records.
- prs 16y agoWhat is the ?t=mattc58 good for in the URL? Just curious.
- mattculbreth 16y agoA fun hack he put it to make a leaderboard of people who talk about DDG. It's at http://duckduckgo.com/spread.html http://duckduckgo.com/spread.html.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jackowayed 16y agoSeconding this. DDG is awesome. The zero-click info is often very nice, I love the keyboard shortcuts (though there's a google keyboard shortcuts experiment), and !bang[1] is really awesome. There's a bunch of other occasionally-useful goodies[2]. It'll do disambiguation if you search something with many meanings (eg. Ruby). Infinite pagination. I switched a month or 2 ago, and I've been very happy. And if I search for something and don't like the results, I hit / (the keyboard shortcut to select the text of the search box), hit right-arrow (to get my cursor to the end of the search box), add a "!g" to the end, and hit enter. And then I usually find that google's results are just as bad :) 1: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html 2: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html
- mmmmax 16y ago!bang is the most useful search feature since I'm Feeling Lucky. I submitted this exact feature to Google years ago, and DuckDuckGo's implementation of it caused me to switch search engines.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoThx! Note that we've had I'm Feeling Ducky through !bang for a while (!+space+sarch), but the last few days I've made it even easier. You can now do /+search, e.g. /slashdot or whatever. Also all the !bang commands now will take you right to the site if you don't follow them with a search, e.g. !a takes you to amazon.
- mmmmax 16y agoNice work, as usual, Gabriel.
- xiongchiamiov 16y agoMeh. I don't see the point of using !amazon, for instance, when I already have a search in firefox for the same thing. Just 'o a foo' (as I'm using vimperator) and I'm on amazon.
- ElliotH 16y agoI use DuckDuckGo for pretty much all my day to day searching. Sometimes if I'm looking for a very specific page I still use Google - but just sticking !g on the end of your search makes that very easy.
- jacquesm 16y agoI've been trying to wean myself of the google habit but I find myself returning to them over and over again. So far nobody seems to do search as good as they do. Maybe the only way to get rid of google is to accept that you won't be finding things as easily any more. But that would automatically give everybody a competitive advantage over you.
- dreur 16y agoand any other good webmail alternative to gmail? HN Startup anyone?
- tmart 16y agowell there is zoho
- ximeng 16y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1593343 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1593343 on the front page of Ask HN
- alec 16y agoI hear rave reviews about the recently-revamped Hotmail, but haven't quite overcome my prejudice against the brand to try it.
- mike_h 16y agoAny details on what you've heard good about it? It was so slow and poorly laid-out for me that I finally decided to trust Microsoft with my gmail address enough to let them forward my hotmail there.
- hockeybias 16y agoI wanted to like bing and I do use it. But I find that for many things that I search on (hockey-related, for example) I more often than not get what I consider to be better results from google.
- tfinniga 16y agoThis doesn't exactly answer your question, but this Bing-based live search is pretty awesome: http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/ http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/
- inodeman 16y agothis looks very nice, is it getting results just from Bing? Would be nice to get results from different search engines. Thanks
- jeromec 16y agoI'm curious to see the quality of Blekko search which is supposed to be launching soon... http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the-blekko-search-engine-prepares-to-launch/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the-blekk...
- daredevildave 16y agoIt didn't take me long to get into the beta after following them on twitter. So far seems pretty nice, though I haven't used it that much.
- mmphosis 16y agohttp://gigablast.com/ http://gigablast.com/
- dennisgorelik 16y agoThat's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you politically disagree with the company. BTW, "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing. Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government regulations tend to not end good.
- makmanalp 16y agoWell, enforcing freedom and human rights also requires government regulation.
- shadowfox 16y agoHmm. I found this a little confusing. > That's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you politically disagree with the company Why would you continue to support a company whose policies you no longer support (if that was the case)? > "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing Can you explain a bit here? > Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government regulations tend to not end good. Almost any sort of "enforcing" requires government support for it to be legal. This includes property rights. So I am not sure what is the exact point here
- notahacker 16y agoIf you're using Google without clicking on their ads you're not exactly supporting them...
- gasull 16y agoWrong. You're helping them improve their search when you use it.
- agentcoops 16y agoIf you're giving Google data, you're most certainly supporting them.
- dennisgorelik 16y ago
- othermaciej 16y agoI've been using Bing for search on both desktop and my iPhone, ever since it became an option in Safari. It's actually pretty good. At first I would flip back to Google pretty often when I doubted the quality of the Bing results, but the Google results were rarely better (subjectively) and were sometimes worse in such cases.
- prakash 16y agoIt's been almost a year since I switched to DuckDuckGo (http://www.cloudknow.com/2010/04/duckduckgo-as-my-primary-search-engine/ http://www.cloudknow.com/2010/04/duckduckgo-as-my-primary-se...) Heck, if Gabriel started charging users for the service, I would gladly pay him.
- tome 16y agoBing is fine for search most of the time, and the odd time when it isn't I revert to Google. The thing I don't have a replacement for is Google Calendar which is great. But: I don't like Google knowing exactly what I'm doing every day!
- tjpick 16y agonot exactly sure about calendars specific features but you probably wouldn't have too hard a time running your own calendaring server
- inodeman 16y agoAll these links are awesome, any more?
- mmphosis 16y agohttp://altavista.com/ http://altavista.com/
- mmphosis 16y agohttp://mamma.com/ http://mamma.com/
- buzz27 16y agoi've been using duckduckgoose for 6 months due to google's evil. but, now, it is because duckduckgoose is so good!
- nollidge 16y agoI think you mean duckduckgo.
- markstahler 16y agohttp://duckduckgo.com/faq.html http://duckduckgo.com/faq.html - What's with the name?
- mmphosis 16y agohttp://lycos.com/ http://lycos.com/
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jchonphoenix 16y agoBing is actually a very nice search engine. It occasionally outperforms google in certain aspects of search, and has some extremely useful features that google doesn't have, although you'll have to dig around the site to find these (such as farecast, and the visual search). I still recommend google for things such as technological search. For the majority of tail queries google still does better. DuckDuckGo on the other hand is a nice search engine. However, it is objectively not as good at finding results as the other too. You can use statistical measures with RMSE and human rated errors to measure the accuracy of the machine learning and results pages that turn up in a search engine. DuckDuckGo is not even on the radar for google or microsoft because its core product--search--isn't even on the same level as the other two.
- johnfn 16y agoI have tried DuckDuckGo, Blekko and Bing, all for about a month each. I recommend Bing. The thing that you almost forget after using Google forever is that they can always pull up relevant links to what you want, even from ancient forum posts if it's a really esoteric issue that only 5 people have ever had. DuckDuckGo is decent, but it's no where near Google in that capability. Blekko not even close to DDG. (I have been using Blekko for my default search engine for a week or two now, but I almost always have to revert back to Google, except for really obvious results that I could probably pull up without a search engine entirely. I feel bad saying it, but it really isn't that good. Hopefully they keep working on it, though. ) Bing, on the other hand, was almost neck and neck with Google; it was only very occasionally that I would revert back to Google, and I used Bing for perhaps a month. I theorize that this is because Bing has millions (billions?) of Microsoft dollars behind it, way more than any other competing search engine. I think I'm going to go back to DDG for a bit. I only used it a few months ago; I'm interested to see if it's gotten better.
- strebler 16y agoAgreed, Bing is my vote too...if only they could increase their coverage a bit!
- _delirium 16y agoI'm not sure how widespread it is, but a handful of Bing blindspots I've run across are something they can't do anything about without violating robots.txt: a decent number of sites block all crawlers by default, but whitelist GoogleBot, presumably from a "we don't want to be crawled, but we do want to be googleable" line of thought.
- bad_user 16y agohttp://blogs.perl.org/users/cpan_testers/2010/01/msnbot-must-die.html http://blogs.perl.org/users/cpan_testers/2010/01/msnbot-must...
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- rgrieselhuber 16y agoI like DDG and Blekko as alternatives.
- will_critchlow 16y agoTry the English version of Yandex (http://www.yandex.com/ http://www.yandex.com/) - the Russian search engine. They just released it one day fully functioning. It's not a complete alternative, but it's interesting and worth a try...
- mmphosis 16y agoYandex is popular and also Baidu (http://www.baidu.com/ http://www.baidu.com/) - the Chinese search engine, no english version, but the search appears to work well regardless of language. You may see evidence of these two search engines crawling in your web server logs.
- smallblacksun 16y agoIf you have moral objections to Google, you don't want to be using Baidu.
- run4yourlives 16y agoIf you use the search engine, but no other feature including clicking on their ads, you are actually costing them money, are you not? That said you should probably search for inconsequential things rather than not use them at all.
- nuttendorfer 16y agoHave been using DDG for more general info and Google if I need to look something up (Errors, movie quotes etc)
- SecretAgentMan 16y agoI've seen a lot of responses recommending Bing. What is Microsoft's stance on net neutrality? Aren't they the company that tried to prevent other web browsers from being installed on their OS back in 98? Don't get me wrong, my business is enmeshed with google now and I'm looking for alternatives, but if the problem is with Google's political stance on net neutrality wouldn't all these recommendations be incomplete without including a statement on the company's political stance with regards to net neutrality?
- jinushaun 16y agoSearch is easy. Just use Bing. It's good enough and better in many respects. The bigger problem is finding replacing Gmail, Docs, Reader, GCal, Maps, Analytics, YouTube, Finance, Picasa, Android, etc. My life is tied to Google. Search is tiny compared to the other invaluable services I use. Even if I find replacements for all these services online, there is also the desktop and mobile integration question. MS talks a lot about "cloud computing" but I've yet to see it from them. With Google, however, I am able to access all my data across multiple devices.
- tremendo 16y agoSearch: DuckDuckGo works well, only occasionally do I revert to Google for general searches. Image search: ? Devilfinder can be useful, sometimes, but mostly gives NSFW results. Voice: ? Voxox is such a bloated piece of software, but also offers Fax (when will it die? please?) Mail: oh there are plenty of alternatives, none half as good. Then again, I'm a proud mutt user ;) Calendar: Airset? Nah, only desktop apps compare. Reader: I guess I'll go back to my Sage Firefox plugin. Browser: Opera or Firefox. But to run Webkit on Linux what? Midori? that crashes every other page load.
- jackolas 16y agoArora. http://code.google.com/p/arora/ http://code.google.com/p/arora/
- tremendo 16y agoThanks, I had tried to install Arora before but couldn't find a package for Ubuntu (Hardy at the time). I just installed it, and crashed it too :(
- xiongchiamiov 16y ago> Browser: Opera or Firefox. But to run Webkit on Linux what? Chromium, Konqueror, and uzbl come to mind. There are probably a few others from this list that might be interesting to you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-based_browsers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-bas...
- rajuvegesna 16y agoThere are my preferences. Infact, I use all of these. Search: Bing (This is my default search engine); Maps: Bing (Their Bird's Eye is way cooler than Google Maps); Gmail, Calendar: Zoho Mail & Calendar; Docs & Apps: Zoho Docs & Business; Voice: YouMail.com; Translate: MicrosoftTranslator.com; Sites: Weebly; Finance: Y! Finance; YouTube: Blip.tv, Viddler, Vimeo; Photos: Flickr; Browser: Firefox/Safari
- viraptor 16y agomail / calendar: try Zoho applications. They're not as great, but they're quickly getting to a really good quality. I'm quite happy with what they're offering and considering moving my domain's emails there. Especially now that they've got basically everything included there - document viewers, notes, planners, etc.
- noonespecial 16y agoI like Bing myself. i don't use it much yet, but when i do, it seems to work pretty well. So far, Bing is kind of like the lifeboat on the good ship Google. I don't use it on a daily basis, but I'm sure glad its there.
- calebamsden 16y agoI think people aren't looking at the bigger picture here... In 5 years the internet is going to look incredibly different than it does today - regardless of Google's, Verizon's or the FCC's position on "Net Neutrality". Whether it's IBM's laser/light data transfer technology (http://www.pcworld.com/article/202018/intel_turns_to_light_to_transfer_data_inside_pcs.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/202018/intel_turns_to_light_t...) or something we haven't even seen yet, the power of innovation will make the net neutrality argument (almost) irrelevant. You should choose the product that best fits your needs. Also, do you really think Microsoft is less 'evil' than Google? I'm driven crazy every day by Microsoft products and their business practices!
- techiferous 16y ago"Also, do you really think Microsoft is less 'evil' than Google?" Both Microsoft and Google are too big to be given a blanket judgment of "evil" or "good". There are so many people, projects, locations, etc. involved that it's probably more constructive to talk about specific products or policies that you do/don't like. For example, here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Microsoft has opened their New England Research & Development Center. They've opened up their private office space to tons of public tech meetings (JavaScript meetups, web design meetups, startup-related events, Ignite Boston, etc. etc.). They offer great facilities and even provide food. As a result, they're really enabling the startup and tech community here. Google also has an office here in Cambridge, but I can't think of anything that they're doing here to help startups. So is Microsoft good and Google evil because of this? It's just one glimpse of two vast empires...
- samratjp 16y agoHonestly, the biggest thing that stopped me from using Bing was the interface and the left navigation bar. The subtle thing prevented me from transitioning from Google.
- zephyrfalcon 16y agoMany people in this thread recommend Bing, which may be a good search engine... However, the reason you are switching is not to find a better search engine, but to make a political statement. In that light, recommending a Microsoft search engine seems a bit odd. I don't want to go all Slashdot "Micro$oft sux" here, but... if one thinks Google is evil because of this net neutrality thing, then what is Microsoft, whose track record is about ten times worse?
- piotrSikora 16y agoCould you elaborate a bit more on "Microsoft's track record"? Most people complain on Microsoft just to complain, without any valid reasons...
- _delirium 16y agoIn Ye Olde 1990s (and some early 2000s), they were somewhat notorious for trying to exclude competitors from retail stores and OEMs, e.g. by pricing Windows in a way such that anyone who sold non-Windows machines was penalized (somewhat similar to the stuff Intel got accused of doing in the AMD settlement). Vaguely in the same class as the net-neutrality issue, of trying to control the distribution channels rather than just competing on a level playing field.
- RagingPanda 16y ago...and nothing has changed in a decade+, right?
- zephyrfalcon 16y agoHm, this would be a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft To be fair, this page also exists, and is just as long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
- drinian 16y agoIf you're going to switch search engines, you should start blocking out Google advertising and analytics services as well; AdBlockPlus and an /etc/hosts killfile are good places to start.
- kragen 16y agoI did an experiment on this last year. Both Y!S and ask.com (of all things) came out as reasonable alternatives. Bing didn't. Things may have changed by now. http://canonical.org/~kragen/search-comparison-2009.html http://canonical.org/~kragen/search-comparison-2009.html
- easyfrag 16y agoSearch is one thing but what I'm uncomfortable with is how much of my personal stuff is stored on Google, stuff like mail, rss feeds (and the current read/unread state), calendars, docs, etc. I was a bit uncomfortable before and the Buzz fiasco and the recent uproar over Net Neutrality hasn't exactly eased my mind. I would like to run my own servers for the above functionality but don't want the overhead of managing machines and backups. I could be interested in a package of products that runs the software in the cloud and configured to use my own domain name and stores data on my own S3/dropbox. In a perfect world it would be easy to switch providers for the various layers. I'm sure this is technically feasible today but I'm talking about an easy to use setup, ease of use being totally subjective of course. I wouldn't necessarily object to using Google for one of the above layers or services, I just don't like one company having all of it.
- wenbert 16y agoIMHO, I am more concerned about Google Apps. If they decide to do something "evil" on it, then I am dead. Google Search on the other hand; I can use Bing or other alternatives easily without actual loss.
- jrussbowman 16y agowhile there's not a solution for plain web search yet, unscatter.com has a great interface for finding the most recent information about topics. Web search is actually the next large piece I will be adding. It is primarily powered by Bing because of their API limits, ie: none. For web specifically the real advantage will be the tab based user interface I am working on
- Jacob_W 16y agoGo with Microsoft. They're huge, and with their Office software going online, they're your best bet. Plus, Bing is excellent.
- 3pt14159 16y agoBlekko has been awesome for me when Google fails. The reason I use them is that DuckDuckGo and Google have a very large overlap in the result set, while Blekko does not, so it is a perfect site to go to when Google is being hit by too much SEO spam.
- Setsuna 16y agoI'm seeing quite a lot of discussion like this. What is the probability that Google notices the trend and changes their behavior?
- pathik 16y agoThis seems more and more like the Quit Facebook movement, and will inevitably fail in the end. There is no real alternative to Google. DDG and Blekko are nice for a change but can definitely not replace it. And for me, Google > Bing.
- Pistos2 16y agoI have been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for a few months now, after having given it a second chance. At this rate, I find the result sets good enough that I only turn to Google for maybe 1 in 40 searches. The number one reason to use DDG: The developer is friendly and accessible. I don't expect you could get a personal response to a feature request or comment from Bing or Google. Mailwise, I recently set up my own mail server, so that has let me begin phasing my GMail account out. As far as spam control goes, Bogofilter has served me extremely well for years.