> There are a handful of good alternatives. Use one. Use multiple. For search at least, unfortunately, the alternatives are pretty questionable. I've been usin

> There are a handful of good alternatives. Use one. Use multiple. For search at least, unfortunately, the alternatives are pretty questionable. I've been using DuckDuckGo experimentally for a few months now, which is mostly Bing as the backend, with some DDG-specific add-ons and tweaks. I find myself having to use the !g command to rerun the search in Google somewhere around 40% of the time. Some of this is site owners causing the problem: a surprising number of sites block all crawlers in robots.txt, but then whitelist Googlebot and only Googlebot. But even leaving aside those sites, DDG seems to miss a lot of results, and the quality of the first-page results, at least for how I search, is consistently lower. If you try searching in a language other than English the differences are even larger. I suspect that's because some of the infrastructure and datasets used for Google Translate are also used by search in some form, while Bing doesn't have a similarly solid multilingual stack. I'd like to see more competition in search, but the barrier to entry to produce a good full-web search engine seems quite high.