

Ask HN: What search engines do you use besides Google? Why? - tokenadult

I just did a search of previous threads here, after a day of looking up information in search engines other than Google. My try-out of other search engines came after trying Bing for a search, and seeing Bing invite me to take its challenge of comparing its search results to Google's. (For all five of the searches I tried, I preferred Google's results.) I tried a bunch of other search engines, including some I hadn't tried for years, once that got me curious.<p>What do you think? Do you regularly use a search engine other than Google? Why do you like it? What does it do better than Google? What's a good search engine to use regularly for looking up varied information?
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richeyrw
I'll occasionally use Wolfram Alpha (<http://www.wolframalpha.com/>) for well
defined searches for example "countries by population". For stuff like that
it's awesome.

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Devlin_Donnelly
I use DuckDuckGo - <http://duckduckgo.com> \- which has some nice features
such as distinguishing between different meanings of a search term as well as
respecting user privacy.

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will_brown
This following link, is a google image search for Tomorrowbook a search engine
I developed. Even when Tomorrowbook was live and I was trying to make a
conscientious effort to use it instead of Google, by instinct I would go to
Google first.

As the example searches for "obama" and "news" show, the results were
displayed as favicons/custom logos only. Tomorrowbook was developed with both
the Google and Bing API, but the link only shows the Bing version.

If you like the "Google results" there are a lot of search engines running the
Google API, so will get the same results but a different display and/or UI
and/or UX. Aside from tomorrowbook, blackle.com (energy saving google) is one
I remember - funny enough it was always hard to find search engine using the
google api using Google but you will run into some interesting ones, I think
one way I found a bunch was searching "best search engines for kids".

[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=i...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1600&bih=799&q=tomorrowbook&oq=tomorrowbook&gs_l=img.3...2833.9767.0.10203.14.9.1.4.3.0.186.989.6j3.9.0...0.0...1ac.1.4.img.NclVK2knjHQ#hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=tomorrowbook.com&oq=tomorrowbook.com&gs_l=img.3...3271.5567.0.5849.4.4.0.0.0.0.95.351.4.4.0...0.0...1c.1.4.img.P-3moKI0cy0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.42965579,d.b2I&fp=b2ec2b8615f06a9f&biw=1600&bih=799)

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brudgers
Mainly, one could say I switch back and forth between Bing and Google as their
results degrade into customized marketing - at least on my desktop. My phone
is nearly all Bing.

But after discovering Blekko here on HN by reading Chuck McManus's profile
it's gaining traction in the rotation.

Finally, on my desktop, I use Wikipedia a lot for searches - prefix "w" in
searches, and it shouldn't be dismissed as a search engine.

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logn
Yandex has a large index. They used to have a simple UI but recent updates
make it look like it's from 2009. DuckDuckGo bothers me in that it just
aggregates other engines.

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kayhi
DuckDuckGo has its own bot:
[http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources)

