Google search engine alternatives

Question

We all use Google search engine and it makes life easier. It's the best at the moment but that doesn't mean that there will be no rivals/alternatives to Google. Do you know any search engines which claim to be better than Google by some features?

Answer 1

DuckDuckGo is suggested to be used instead of Google to get:

• Zero-click info — useful info above the links.
• Privacy — we do not track you. Google does.
• Less spam & ads — omits 60 million useless sites.
• Official sites — labeled official and on top.
• Meanings — for ambiguous terms.
• Keyboard shortcuts — forget the mouse.
• Customization — change the fonts and more.
• No clutter — just results, not other stuff.
• Search other sites — check out !bang syntax.
• Categories — explore related topics.
• Favicons — site icons next to results.

Answer 2

I've been using Bing (formerly Live Search) for over a year and I am quite satisfied with its results.

The most important feature for me is the number of pages they have indexed. Google probably still has a larger index but in my opinion Bing's index includes all the relevant pages.

Answer 3

Blekko is a new search engine that uses lots of slashtags to search different verticals.

Answer 4

Yandex

Yandex Search is a web search engine owned by Russian corporation Yandex. It is the core product of Yandex.

The search technology provides local search results in more than 1,400 cities. Yandex Search also features “parallel” search that presents results from both main web index and specialized information resources, including news, shopping, blogs, images and videos on a single page.

Yandex Search is responsive to real-time queries, recognizing when a query requires the most current information, such as breaking news or the most recent post on Twitter on a particular topic. It also contains some additional features: Wizard Answer, which provides additional information (for example, sports results), spell checker, autocomplete which suggests queries as-you-type, antivirus that detects malware on webpages and so on.

The search product can be accessed from personal computers, mobile phones, tablets and other digital devices. In addition to web search, Yandex provides wide range of specialized search services. Yandex Search uses proprietary algorithms to provide relevant results.

Answer 5

Wolfram|Alpha is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.

Wolfram Alpha is used to power some searches in the Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo search engines. It is also queried by Apple's Siri for factual question answering.

Answer 6

GuiGoog is nice. It is still Google but is a Custom Google Search.

http://guigoog.com/index.html?q=&cx=partner-pub-0768117446212054:z8dgu5-yk7b&ie=UTF-8&cof=FORID:9#

Answer 7

Complete Planet (Deep Web search engine)

A comprehensive listing of dynamic searchable databases. Find databases with highly relevant documents that cannot be crawled or indexed by surface web search engines.

What is Google Missing?

The Surface Web contains only a fraction of the overall content available on-line today. Of the top 5 surface search engines, Google represents only 63% of the total indexed content of the Surface Web alone! (http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2476)

Limiting search to a single source (like Google), will produce a one-dimensional set of results. Harvesting from many sources, 10 to 20 or even 100, will yield far more documents and far more relevant content.

Google, most likely, will not contain the most recent version of a document. Further, there is no way to “refresh” a Google search. Google will often have false positive hits - content that matches your query but is not relevant to your search. Additionally, Google cannot distinguish a page of links from a page of content.