5 ms·
Ask HN: Unbiased Search Engines?
What are the state of 2024 search engines?
I have used DuckDuckGo for a long time, but the results seem to follow an agenda instead of just showing "what is" on the web, and leave me to use my own judgement.
What do you use? Or do you even use an Search Engine for most part since AI is getting increasingly better?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoA single shell script that provides command line search using a variety of different search engines; some are www search, some are site-specific. The results are processed with a filter written in C that outputs SQLite3. The SQL database can be used to create simple HTML or whatever I may need. Thus, if I want "meta-search" I can create this easily: HTML pages that combine SERPs from different sources. Any "search" controlled by a so-called "tech" company has a bias in favour of advertising services. To get an idea of what is actually on the web, take a look at the .com zone file. An enormous percentage of websites are unreachable via search engine. This does not mean they have no value, it only means they have no value to the sale of advertising services, e.g., they are not popular. Hence search engines are biased against listing them in results.
- martinbaun 3y agoHey, what is this script called? And where do you have the results?
- XxCincinnatusxX 3y agoDDG got crappier when they stopped indexing the Russian search engine Yandex in my opinion. If there's anything I'm having trouble finding on DDG, I just search for it on Yandex now
- martinbaun 3y agoSame here actually. Funnily enough to find uncensored info about the world we have to go to Russian sites. Crazy.
- warrenm 3y agoNo such thing as an "unbiased search engine" And that is not a knock on Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, Qwant, etc It is a fact - every search engine is making some kind of decision about `"what is" on the web`: they have their own crawling cycles, internal rankings, ability to reach content, etc I use Qwant most often on my personal MacBooks Bing on my iPhone and iPad DDG on my wife's iPhone and iPad Google at work (because we are defaulted to Chrome with limited ability to change defaults) Do they all return "the same" results? More-or-less ... ish You could run something like the meta search engine searX yourself, and give it the list of other search engines to hit and then return results to you (I did for a little while ... but decided it was not yielding better enough results (for me) to keep going vs just hitting the underlying engines
- martinbaun 3y agoThanks, I'll take a look at QWant. Limited ability to change Chromes' settings at work? Sounds fancy :P
- warrenm 3y agoI dunno how "fancy" it is ... but it is what it is :)
- martinbaun 3y agoMaybe I ask what you do, or is it top secret? :P
- warrenm 3y agoI work in enterprise software consulting - nothing "secret" ...but our work laptops are managed devices - not a lot can be changed (that sticks) with some of our defaults :)
- martinbaun 3y agoAh, I guess it is big enterprise :) Java? Cobol? :P