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I remember when the search engine space was full of cool competitors. AltaVista, Yahoo, GoTo, Dogpile, Northern Light, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Excite, WebCrawler. N

I remember when the search engine space was full of cool competitors. AltaVista, Yahoo, GoTo, Dogpile, Northern Light, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Excite, WebCrawler. Now we have Google whose value comes with their incessant privacy abuse, and Bing/Bing front ends (DDG). Cool and exciting are definitely no longer the emotions I associate with web search.

aeyes 5y ago
People might be slightly annoyed but I have to say that Yandex Search is pretty good, even for international users. Try it: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=409a&lang=en https://yandex.ru/search/?text=409a&lang=en
- mateo1 5y ago
  Yandex might be good in Russian (I don't know) but it's barely mediocre in English and really bad at other less common languages. The only good thing about it was that it used to give unfiltered results for some queries that google had shadowbanned (such as for piratebay or scihub). However as far as I can tell thats no longer always the case.
- CrispinS 5y ago
  I've never used their normal search engine, but their image search blows Google out of the water. I highly encourage anyone who frequently uses Google images to try out Yandex. What's really interesting is the differences in the results -- it seems like Yandex is actually filtering for high quality art. I've got a project on the back burner to scrape google and Yandex for the same queries and then do different sorts of analysis on them and see if anything interesting pops up. Going by eye, most photo results on Yandex are higher resolution, and more saturated. It also doesn't pull images from video thumbnails like Google does.
  - throwaway0x7E6 5y ago
    seconded. it's stellar, even better than what google used to be. feed it a cropped frame from a japanese cartoon and it returns links to illegitimate websites containing the full episode. google returns a nonsensical ML suggestion and no results
- Jerry2 5y ago
  My favorite part about Yandex is that there's no DMCA. The amount of DMCA notices against search engines like Google and Bing is absolutely astonishing. Thousands of them are filed every day and a massive amount of webpages are delisted because of these complaints. You can look up some of them in the LumenDatabase [1]. [1] https://www.lumendatabase.org/ https://www.lumendatabase.org/
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  For adult searches and IP protected work sourcing, it's also a decent medium. Yeah, I meant it's good for porn and pirating.
thatmiddleway 5y ago
Kagi is really shaping up to be a great search experience. The fact that it’s going to be a paid service is a killer feature. No ads is incredibly refreshing.
- 0des 5y ago
  You got me fucked up if you think I'm tying payment credentials to my search queries.
  - dinkleberg 5y ago
    If you’ve ever used google pay for anything presumably that ship has already sailed.
    - 0des 5y ago
      I haven't and don't use google services.
      - lstamour 5y ago
        You sound like the type to also disable cookies and use an adblocker and not use Chrome, but there are many ways Google can collect your credit cards or associate your purchase history. From Google Analytics to remembering the card in Chrome and syncing Chrome browser history to having a Gmail record of your purchases or even adding a credit card to your phone to use with Google Pay on an Android device… or while we’re at it, using Android. Lots of spying there unless you run Blokada Proxy or equivalent. Not to mention, if cookies are disabled, but you click on a Google ad, Google will likely help track the purchase with the third-party advertiser’s site using some alternative identifier they could assign outside of a cookie. After all, if you control the URL, you can inject session tokens. Not saying they do, but they could, and they probably make the data available in Google Analytics somehow, even with cookies disabled. I realized the other day that thanks to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, these big companies know a ton about you just because your employer uses them. For example you might not be signed in using that web browser, but your work account just leaked your IP address or device metadata to Google, so they know it’s you anyway. It’s almost impossible to stay completely private online, these days, and still participate in the economy or society. I would, though, draw a line and say that just because it’s possible to trace doesn’t mean it should be allowed… but we’ve all seen how the most effective countermeasures isn’t legislation but instead clients that can outsmart the trackers - like adblockers, privacy VPN proxies, DNS black holes, and Apple’s iCloud Private Relay (or similar VPNs) which would anonymize your IP address, partially defeating the point made earlier. (I say partially because it’s not like every packet is going to get a new IP address, that would break TCP connections… they could associate your work profile with your anonymous traffic using the same relay IP, if both traffic sources hit the same Google server from the same device, say…) And of course we have historically shown that almost any collection of data can reveal a lot about a person, from Netflix watch history to search terms. I’m ignoring the obvious - that searching Google gives it information about you with every search.
barbacoa 5y ago
I've been trying brave as of recent. It feels like browsing the internet of the 90s; back when you search engines returned small no-name websites and blogs. Google gives me the same list of 50 or so "preferred" websites full of click bait run by media companies no matter what I search.
j-james 5y ago
The search engine space is full of cool competitors today. Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Neeva, Brave, Startpage, Alexandria, Right DAO, Wiby, Marginalia, Teclis. Certainly, a few of those are Bing/Google frontends, but many more are independent or weighted mixes of commercial and noncommercial indexes. I really like Kagi, Wiby, Marginalia (Search), and Teclis to name a few. I found most of these through this post: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
- ColinHayhurst 5y ago
  Any reason to leave us out? We are, after all, one of a very small number of truly independent indexes. https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-track.html https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-track.htm...
  - aiden120000 5y ago
    I’ve seen you post links to the mojeek blog on HN a few times now. I have never used mojeek for the simple fact that there’s no link to the app from your blog. Having to guess (or google) what the actual url for the app is is a bit too much friction for me. Especially when I do most of my HN browsing on mobile.
    - ColinHayhurst 5y ago
      Many thanks. You are right; the button, which appears on desktop, does not appear on mobile. We'll get it fixed.
      - aiden120000 5y ago
        I look forwards to checking it out next time you pop up here… or if I remember next time I’m on desktop
    - h2onock 5y ago
      Why wouldn’t you just search for the app in your App Store if you want it?
alimov 5y ago
Somewhat related, but I remember Ask Jeeves as being my first exposure to search engines. I had just gotten internet on my home computer and one of my parents friends came over and excitedly told me about “this website that will give you the answer to anything you ask”. I didn’t even know what to search for (I think I ended up searching “tallest woman in the world”), the idea of being able to quickly look something up and quickly get references was pretty foreign to me and now it’s hard to imagine life without the ability to do so. Edit: whenever I see the Jenkins logo, I always think of the Ask Jeeves logo from back then
richardsocher 5y ago
I agree. That's why I started https://you.com/ https://you.com/

aeyes 5y ago

People might be slightly annoyed but I have to say that Yandex Search is pretty good, even for international users. Try it: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=409a&lang=en https://yandex.ru/search/?text=409a&lang=en

mateo1 5y ago
Yandex might be good in Russian (I don't know) but it's barely mediocre in English and really bad at other less common languages. The only good thing about it was that it used to give unfiltered results for some queries that google had shadowbanned (such as for piratebay or scihub). However as far as I can tell thats no longer always the case.
CrispinS 5y ago
I've never used their normal search engine, but their image search blows Google out of the water. I highly encourage anyone who frequently uses Google images to try out Yandex. What's really interesting is the differences in the results -- it seems like Yandex is actually filtering for high quality art. I've got a project on the back burner to scrape google and Yandex for the same queries and then do different sorts of analysis on them and see if anything interesting pops up. Going by eye, most photo results on Yandex are higher resolution, and more saturated. It also doesn't pull images from video thumbnails like Google does.
- throwaway0x7E6 5y ago
  seconded. it's stellar, even better than what google used to be. feed it a cropped frame from a japanese cartoon and it returns links to illegitimate websites containing the full episode. google returns a nonsensical ML suggestion and no results
Jerry2 5y ago
My favorite part about Yandex is that there's no DMCA. The amount of DMCA notices against search engines like Google and Bing is absolutely astonishing. Thousands of them are filed every day and a massive amount of webpages are delisted because of these complaints. You can look up some of them in the LumenDatabase [1]. [1] https://www.lumendatabase.org/ https://www.lumendatabase.org/
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
For adult searches and IP protected work sourcing, it's also a decent medium. Yeah, I meant it's good for porn and pirating.

thatmiddleway 5y ago

Kagi is really shaping up to be a great search experience. The fact that it’s going to be a paid service is a killer feature. No ads is incredibly refreshing.

0des 5y ago
You got me fucked up if you think I'm tying payment credentials to my search queries.
- dinkleberg 5y ago
  If you’ve ever used google pay for anything presumably that ship has already sailed.
  - 0des 5y ago
    I haven't and don't use google services.
    - lstamour 5y ago
      You sound like the type to also disable cookies and use an adblocker and not use Chrome, but there are many ways Google can collect your credit cards or associate your purchase history. From Google Analytics to remembering the card in Chrome and syncing Chrome browser history to having a Gmail record of your purchases or even adding a credit card to your phone to use with Google Pay on an Android device… or while we’re at it, using Android. Lots of spying there unless you run Blokada Proxy or equivalent. Not to mention, if cookies are disabled, but you click on a Google ad, Google will likely help track the purchase with the third-party advertiser’s site using some alternative identifier they could assign outside of a cookie. After all, if you control the URL, you can inject session tokens. Not saying they do, but they could, and they probably make the data available in Google Analytics somehow, even with cookies disabled. I realized the other day that thanks to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, these big companies know a ton about you just because your employer uses them. For example you might not be signed in using that web browser, but your work account just leaked your IP address or device metadata to Google, so they know it’s you anyway. It’s almost impossible to stay completely private online, these days, and still participate in the economy or society. I would, though, draw a line and say that just because it’s possible to trace doesn’t mean it should be allowed… but we’ve all seen how the most effective countermeasures isn’t legislation but instead clients that can outsmart the trackers - like adblockers, privacy VPN proxies, DNS black holes, and Apple’s iCloud Private Relay (or similar VPNs) which would anonymize your IP address, partially defeating the point made earlier. (I say partially because it’s not like every packet is going to get a new IP address, that would break TCP connections… they could associate your work profile with your anonymous traffic using the same relay IP, if both traffic sources hit the same Google server from the same device, say…) And of course we have historically shown that almost any collection of data can reveal a lot about a person, from Netflix watch history to search terms. I’m ignoring the obvious - that searching Google gives it information about you with every search.

barbacoa 5y ago

I've been trying brave as of recent. It feels like browsing the internet of the 90s; back when you search engines returned small no-name websites and blogs. Google gives me the same list of 50 or so "preferred" websites full of click bait run by media companies no matter what I search.

j-james 5y ago

The search engine space is full of cool competitors today. Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Neeva, Brave, Startpage, Alexandria, Right DAO, Wiby, Marginalia, Teclis. Certainly, a few of those are Bing/Google frontends, but many more are independent or weighted mixes of commercial and noncommercial indexes. I really like Kagi, Wiby, Marginalia (Search), and Teclis to name a few. I found most of these through this post: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

ColinHayhurst 5y ago
Any reason to leave us out? We are, after all, one of a very small number of truly independent indexes. https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-track.html https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-track.htm...
- aiden120000 5y ago
  I’ve seen you post links to the mojeek blog on HN a few times now. I have never used mojeek for the simple fact that there’s no link to the app from your blog. Having to guess (or google) what the actual url for the app is is a bit too much friction for me. Especially when I do most of my HN browsing on mobile.
  - ColinHayhurst 5y ago
    Many thanks. You are right; the button, which appears on desktop, does not appear on mobile. We'll get it fixed.
    - aiden120000 5y ago
      I look forwards to checking it out next time you pop up here… or if I remember next time I’m on desktop
  - h2onock 5y ago
    Why wouldn’t you just search for the app in your App Store if you want it?

alimov 5y ago

Somewhat related, but I remember Ask Jeeves as being my first exposure to search engines. I had just gotten internet on my home computer and one of my parents friends came over and excitedly told me about “this website that will give you the answer to anything you ask”. I didn’t even know what to search for (I think I ended up searching “tallest woman in the world”), the idea of being able to quickly look something up and quickly get references was pretty foreign to me and now it’s hard to imagine life without the ability to do so. Edit: whenever I see the Jenkins logo, I always think of the Ask Jeeves logo from back then

richardsocher 5y ago

I agree. That's why I started https://you.com/ https://you.com/