
Lesser-Known Search Engines That Are Worth Checking Out - August-Garcia
https://www.256kilobytes.com/content/show/3004/search-no-further-7-search-engines-that-are-worth-checking-out
======
dontbenebby
I don't know if DuckDuckGo counts as "lesser known" but I find it incredibly
useful.

The !wa bang command is great for weird conversions. (Ex: Sometimes watching
mad men I might plug in "!wa 100 dollars 1960" and out pops an inflation
adjusted figure)

!fake can check a given amazon product for fake reviews

Stuff like Wikipedia (!w), reddit (!r) etc.

Some people complain the results aren't as good as Google but I think they
have either forgotten and/or never learned how to search. Since the engine has
no PII on you, it can't handle ambiguity well. A good heuristic is if your
query would give you a disambiguation page on Wikipedia, add a few terms.

I've been using it exclusively for a while, and the only time I really go back
to Google is for their maps.

~~~
freediver
Every time ddg is mentioned on hn, it receives a lot of praise in the form I
use this or that bang - in essence negating its usefulness as a search engine
and making it a glorified shortcut app.

~~~
save_ferris
I'd counter that with the fact that DDG returns SO answer cards and various
cheatsheets when searched (i.e. "tmux cheatsheet".) I think Google beats DDG
in some ways (better news search results, for example.) But DDG is a much
better programmer-focused search engine IMO, they just don't market themselves
that way.

Back to your bang feature point, I really appreciate that DDG makes it easy to
search Google instead by simply using !g. Tech companies don't always make it
easy to use a competitor, and there's something to be said for DDG not
creating barriers to using other search engines.

~~~
dontbenebby
>Back to your bang feature point, I really appreciate that DDG makes it easy
to search Google instead by simply using !g.

Or you can use !s to use StartPage, which uses Google's results to seed it's
own and is more privacy respecting

------
marttt
There's also Wiby, a search engine for "oldschool", static, single-person-
curated sites: [https://wiby.me](https://wiby.me)

I've copy-pasted this to HN previously, but it's worth posting again --
explanation from their About page:

"Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of
your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost.
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists,
academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in.
Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded
everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of
commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on
finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things
you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no
longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated
scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content
available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier
days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue
browsing the web, as page results are more suitable for their performance."

EDIT: Apparently Wiby also has !g and !b for Google and Bing redirections.

~~~
doorbellguy
I wish it worked as intended. Here's a sample query I put:

[https://wiby.me/?q=bag+of+word+model+matlab](https://wiby.me/?q=bag+of+word+model+matlab)

See the results and decide.

~~~
marttt
As I understand the engine solely consists of user submitted sites. I wonder
how many pages they currently have in their database.

------
superkuh
"Million Short"
[https://millionshort.com/search](https://millionshort.com/search)

It's a search engine that returns results but without the first 100 to first
million popular results with logarithmic steps. It's a great way to step out
the normal popularity filter bubble and find new things.

~~~
dazc
Google less pinterest and ebay is like a dream come true.

~~~
Consultant32452
What a great feature idea. I wish I could configure some regex settings in
[search engine] to force it to never show me certain domains.

------
stackola
Gotta plug shodan, the search engine for refrigerators (and any other
connected device/service)

[https://www.shodan.io](https://www.shodan.io)

------
hjek
Searx[0] is also worth checking out. It's fully free/libre and easy to host
yourself.

It uses other search engines, but so does at least DDG and Ecosia that are
listed there.

[0]: [https://searx.me/](https://searx.me/)

~~~
meruru
I switched from DDG to Searx. Both are pretty good, but Searx is actually FOSS
while the only reason I was using DDG is because it's not Google.

There are actually several Searx instances you can choose:
[https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-
instances](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances)

~~~
BeetleB
You can also just run your own instance on your PC.

------
rjf72
Have two engines I'd like to eventually see:

1) An engine that removes all results from corporate entities. Essentially all
pages would be from mostly independent entities. Obviously this would not be a
primary search engine in and of itself since it's restricting a lot of content
that could be useful, but at times I'd rather see what people are creating
instead heavily SEO'd corporation #64728321. The description of 'Yippy' seemed
promising here, but a search for 'space' quickly lowered my optimism.

2) A truly semantic search engine. It's amazing that e.g. Google was founded
20 years ago. And it was a major step forward in that searches for 'Abraham
Lincoln' would no longer return hardcore porn. But since then we really
haven't really improved much beyond that. Imagine a search for _' pages
updated within the past 30 days about the launch of the crew dragon excluding
large media and all social media results'_ would actually return what I'm
looking for. Wolfram Alpha [1] is a very good proof of concept here, where the
entire internet could effectively be a subset of all results.

[1] - [https://www.wolframalpha.com/](https://www.wolframalpha.com/)

~~~
ldoughty
I would love an engine that knows my blacklist. Stop showing me results from
xyz.com!

If they want to go the extra step and identify sister corps, that works too!

~~~
maltelandwehr
Google once had this feature where you could blacklist domains. Unfortunately
they removed it like 5 years ago :(

~~~
CharlesW
You can still do this with the "Personal Blocklist (by Google)" Chrome
extension.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-
blocklist...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-
goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef)

------
faitswulff
Not mentioned, but there's SymbolHound when searching for programming language
syntax:
[http://symbolhound.com/?q=%26%3Amethod](http://symbolhound.com/?q=%26%3Amethod)

------
beefield
I have been lately surprisingly happy with www.qwant.com . I feel like I need
to add !g much more rarely than with duckduckgo.

~~~
richardhod
Somehow this seems relevant
[http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2602&mobile=1](http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2602&mobile=1)

------
Gasp0de
"Ecosia’s operation leaves a negative CO2 footprint on the world – their
servers operate on 100% renewable energy and each tree that they plant removes
1 KG of CO2 from the atmosphere." But then later it says that Ecosia search
results are based on Bing? If they are effectively searching Bing in the
Background, wouldn't they have to factor in the CO2 footprint of a Bing
search?

------
rasmussondk
[https://www.givero.com](https://www.givero.com) \- just launched. Givero is a
search engine that shares its revenue with good causes you choose.

We silently opened to the public about a month ago, and we are currently
putting the final touches on the site and story, and working on onboarding
more charities. Right now you can support charities working for climate,
animals and children.

Since we have a lot of DuckDuckGo fans on here, I think I should mention that
Givero: * Has DuckDuckGo compatible bangs * Has Instant Answers (just launched
the first 3, more to come) * Is Privacy centric. * Is Bing based, like DDG. *
Is Euro hosted.

So a good mix of DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, with the key difference being that we
donate 50% of our entire revenue to charities you choose.

Full disclosure: I am the founder. We're a small team based in Denmark,
formerly working on Findx (privacy search engine with own index), which shut
down last year.

~~~
doorbellguy
How privacy centric are you guys?

~~~
rasmussondk
We do not keep a history of your searches and has no user profile.

We do not use third-party analytics tools, so your IP is not shared that way.

Your IP is anonymized immediately in our analytics tool (self-hosted Matomo),
and we don't store your queries there.

We anonymize our raw weblogs, which are only used for debugging purposes,
after 5 days.

We do have to pass on your IP to Microsoft at the moment, but you have the
option to turn off personalized results (the "filter bubble", basically) on
the search result page. We are working on getting permission to further
tighten the privacy options here, but Bing requires a certain volume before
they're willing to discuss it (several million searches/month) as we discussed
with their VP of Search Partnerships in Europe. So we're on-par with Ecosia
right now, but working to be on-par with DDG.

------
3into10power5
I asked this the other day. But I am asking again as I didn't get an answer.
Suppose I want to make a small niche improvement on top of existing search
engines. I want to them to provide first level results and then I will provide
additional filters on top. For example, I would get the results from Bing for
example, and then remove all websites which are ad supported.

How should I go forward with this plan? Are there any APIs available? Or
should I put on a biz dev hat and talk to Bing guys?

~~~
ddorian43
This [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-
service...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-
services/bing-web-search-api/) ?

------
JshWright
"Ecosia’s operation leaves a negative CO2 footprint on the world – their
servers operate on 100% renewable energy and each tree that they plant removes
1 KG of CO2 from the atmosphere.?

Only 1kg? Most of a tree's "dry" mass is carbon, it gets that carbon from the
atmosphere, and most trees weigh more than 1kg...

~~~
Gasp0de
I actually went ahead and looked it up for you: "And that’s not all. Since we
use our profits to plant trees, every search with Ecosia actually removes
approximately 1 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere. How? On average, it takes
around 50 searches to finance the planting of a new tree. An average tree
planted by Ecosia will remove around 50 kg of CO2 from the air during its
lifetime."

------
ycombonator
Is there ever going to be search engine that will replace Google as Google
replaced Altavista ?

~~~
3rdgender
If somebody created true AI, they could create a search engine with it that is
better than Google.

~~~
alehul
True AI likely wouldn't be able to deduce context much better from the words
given (i.e. a clear 'this' or 'that' situation, like Hamilton the musical or
Hamilton the individual). It's just impossible to tell sometimes, and would
require user effort to specify. Maybe the value in the AI could be sorting
results into the 'this' category or 'that' category, making perfect results
just one step away for the user?

Also, I've heard that the issue with AI in some specific domains is
substantially slower responses than traditional / non-AI. Would this / how
would this be reflected in a search engine? Would query results be updated
less often?

~~~
3rdgender
True AI would perhaps know the user well enough to know their intent (even
Google already knows the user and perhaps even know they have a likelihood for
a person being more interested in musicals or in maths).

It could also actually understand web sites and create meaningful summaries.
And all sorts of other things.

As for speed, I don't know - it seems in many applications AI is way faster
than traditional approaches. Also things can be parallelized. DeepMind trained
for many years (measured in computing time), but it was parallelized so it
didn't actually take years to train.

------
cowgoesmoo
> At this time, Blackle claims to have saved over 7 million watt-hours of
> energy.

That's only 7000 kwh, or 100 full charges of a Tesla. Seems more like a
gimmick than anything impactful.

------
romseb
> Learn about a handful of helpful search engines that are not Google, Bing,
> or any of the other really obvious ones

The _engines_ behind all of the general-purpose search products mentioned in
the article are still Google or Bing.

I would love to see a competitor.

------
wespiser_2018
Can websites please stop using these bright, loud colors to display text and
html links? Its very hard for me to read this article!

~~~
wespiser_2018
I can barely read orange over blue text...

------
mirimir
Nice. I'd forgotten Wolfram|Alpha.

