DuckDuckGo is good, I've used it for a few months at a time in the past.
Always end up switching back to Google because of local results (I live in the UK, DDG's results are very US-centric even when local results are turned on). Maybe it's gotten better recently. I've seen lots of billboards for DuckDuckGo recently around my hometown in Paisley, Scotland; not a very techie place so they're clearly trying to gain a reach!
I've been using Bing for the past few months and been quite happy with it, only switching to use Google for Maps results and the odd very niche query.
The bonus of Bing is that it pays you in supermarket shopping vouchers where Google doesn't. Sold!
The other day I was trying to remember a specific children's song - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alouette_(song). At the time I forgot that it was about a lark, and thought that it was about a goose. (In my defense, I'm pretty sure this is because a parent told me it was about a goose when I was little because they didn't want to explain wtf a lark was)
So I went bing.com, ddg, and tried something like
nursery rhyme about plucking a goose
Both were filled with pages and pages mother goose links, none of which had anything to do with what I wanted.
Typed that into google and it had an immediate answer, because it correctly surmised that I'm a dumbass and forgot that it wasn't a goose all along.
> Typed that into google and it had an immediate answer, because it correctly surmised that I'm a dumbass and forgot that it wasn't a goose all along.
The problem with Google is that it will always assume that you didn't mean what you asked, and when you did actually mean exactly what you said this gets old really fast.
Funny you said that, today I noticed DDG seems to have changed some location thing.
At the top bar, it seems to state specifically the UK being the location. Searching for things like amazon seems to also return amazon.co.uk rather than amazon.com.
I'm aware of that. But it's the same issue of having to do an extra step every time. It grinds after a while and the amount of times you end up doing it you realise you may as well just use Google/Bing!
Huh, interesting. I've seen them here in the Netherlands as well (and heard they were present in France too), but I'd assumed that that was in preparation of being shown in the choice screens in the EU soon, to get them top of mind when relevant. If it's in the US as well, then it seems like it's just a regular ad campaign.
>I live in the UK, DDG's results are very US-centric even when local results are turned on
Are the local results even supposed to do anything? I tried finding a store carrying a certain video game. I turned on the local filter from under the search bar and nothing. All of the results are the exact same as without. I could not find a single result that was actually local to my country even after going through the pages.
Advanced search on Google definitely brings up local results for me with the same term, so it's not that there are zero results.
Two interesting things I've noticed about Google lately (as a logged in user in Norway):
- less breaking news stories (I realized this the other day as I was looking for a breaking news story that would typically have been at Google a year ago, with link to local newspapers, but I cannot say exactly when this change happened since I mostly left Google behind as default search engine a good while ago. )
- more relevant search results when I search for technical content. The last two or three months search results has actually been improving for me for the first time since probably somewhere between 2007 and 2009
Always end up switching back to Google because of local results (I live in the UK, DDG's results are very US-centric even when local results are turned on). Maybe it's gotten better recently. I've seen lots of billboards for DuckDuckGo recently around my hometown in Paisley, Scotland; not a very techie place so they're clearly trying to gain a reach!
I've been using Bing for the past few months and been quite happy with it, only switching to use Google for Maps results and the odd very niche query.
The bonus of Bing is that it pays you in supermarket shopping vouchers where Google doesn't. Sold!