
Ask HN: Any good alternative search engine not powered by Bing? - fdeage
Ecosia, Qwant and the like seem like glorified Bing-wrappers to me (heck, I heard that even DuckDuckGo uses Bing results for some queries).<p>I understand that creating a search engine from scratch is very hard, but is there any engine that moderately succeeded? (in the Western world I mean)
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qzx_pierri
Call me crazy, but I've been using Yandex a lot more recently. Political FUD
aside, the results are pretty good, and completely unfiltered.

It reminds me of how wild and unfiltered the internet was back in 2007.
However, I wouldn't recommend it to "casual" users. Using Yandex requires a
bit more common sense than Google, because malicious domains show up every now
& then. For power users (99.99% of HN), this isn't a problem.

With all things considered, it's totally worth it. I never realized how
censored Google Search was until I stepped away. As a grown ass man, I don't
want anyone telling me what I "cant see" or attempting to define what's
"acceptable" \- The freedom to choose is intoxicating almost.

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DanBC
Yandex's reverse image search is considerably better than Google's, especially
for people.

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fdeage
Google's reverse image search used to be extremely good too (~5 years ago),
but it seems to have lost its power in the recent years. I guess Google
doesn't want to allow ordinary people to stalk one another based on a given
picture...

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safary22
Building a proper search engine requires massive amounts of resources and a
lot of engineering effort. Especially given the amount of content which exists
out there today.

That said, the 10 blue links are becoming less and less important for most
users. It is very important if you are searching for some obscure piece of
information.

But the vast majority of queries can be broadly categorized as:

1\. navigational queries - I'm trying to get to a site and I don't want/know
to type the address, so queries such as "fb", "yt" or "bank of america"

2\. trending news queries - something is in the news right now and you want to
find articles

3\. shopping queries - looking for products and doing product research

4\. local queries - I want to find the details of that sushi place I like
nearby

5\. more niche experiences around various events

If you take a look at what Google and Bing are trying to do right now, they
are moving away from what was customarily a search engine and more towards
being a portal for you to consume all the content directly on their site
(stuff like AMP is a good example).

While this is bad for the user on many levels, it does reduce the problem
space for companies wanting to create a new search experience.

So the real question is, what are you searching for? if you are looking for a
single search engine that can answer all of the above then you only have 2
options (in the US) If you are looking for a search experience that focuses on
specific verticals there are many options.

One service I am interested in is Neeva Search
[https://neeva.co/](https://neeva.co/) which sounds like they are building a
more modern search experience which better fits with what users are doing
today

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Normille
To your above list, I'd add:

6: Factual knowledge / information

I find myself quite regularly searching for factual information related to
gadgets / devices / machines etc. that I want to find out about. For example;
'Is car AAA easier to find spares for than car BBB?', 'is camera AAA better
constructed than camera BBB?', 'what are the things to look out for when
buying a second hand CCC?

Increasingly, I find that, no matter how I couch the search terms, I end up
getting given pages of results which are sites, trying to sell me the thing I
referenced in the search. I'm lucky if I find the relevant info in the first
page of results. Often it'll be on some discussion forum which crops up way
down the list.

I wish there was some way to tell a search engine "I'm not interested in sites
selling the thing I'm asking about. I just want information" so that the
actual nuggets of genuine info would receive a higher priority.

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hieloz
Search engine list [https://searchengine.party/](https://searchengine.party/).
btw [https://www.runnaroo.com/](https://www.runnaroo.com/) was recently
featured here,it seems fairly good in some respects.

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boogies
Searx [https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/](https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)
is a (wrapper around | metasearch engine aggregating results from) >70 search
services, including Bing and DDG, as well as Wikipedia, Reddit, etc. as
configured by default when using one of the many public instances, _but_ you
can toggle aggregation from each one in the preferences (with or without
hosting it yourself, eg. at
[https://searx.xyz/preferences](https://searx.xyz/preferences) under the
Engines tab).

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timeattack
Yandex.com?

