this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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I stopped using Google years ago. I started using Bing but had to stop that as it would divert me to MSN to sign in when clicking a link for a news article. Like a news article for The Independent or The Times or any other.
I then started using DuckDuckGo which is powered by Bing, but found it wasn’t great at many searches.
I now use Arc Search most of the time and click browse for me to get the information I want without the bullshit. Search is essentially dead due to greed.
Startpage and Qwant are the best alternatives IMO.
https://www.qwant.com/
https://www.startpage.com/
I used Qwant for a few days and then it popped up a modal dialog asking me to turn off my ad-blocker. Never used it again after that.
Funny I've never seen that, but I switch around from time to time. Because none are perfect unfortunately.
kagi is the best but it will cost you $10 a month. It's been worth it to me, but probably not to everyone.
Interesting concept, but it's a bit expensive IMO, considering the huge amount of "free" options.
The pricing is only in USD without taxes. Listing the price excluding tax is illegal here (Denmark and I think the rest of EU), so apparently not a service meant for use outside USA.
Ad free is not a problem for me, i use Firefox with µBlock Origin.
Thanks. I’ll check these out.
What do you prefer about each of them?
Startpage uses outside search results, but should be very secure like DuckDuckGo, and better certified.
Qwant is AFAIK more independent, and I like the layout better.
Both give pretty good search results IMO, but are somewhat lacking in map/geographic searches. For instance searching "Angola" could result in a restaurant in London. Just as a hypothetical example.
So I do use Google maps too.
Thanks for sharing he extra info.
qwant = 95% bing results, startpage = 98% google results. They are slimmer. They don't keep your search history or ip address. better for privacy but not much better for search results.
qwant uses bing and is mostly a proxy for it. Startpage is a proxy for google. the only thing they really do is protect your privacy, they don't give you better search results.
That's a bit disappointing, I thought Qwant had their own search. I know startpage used Google originally, but I wasn't sure if they still did.
Tried start page after DDG outage on Thursday and I'm liking it a lot
Start page was out too afaik
it shouldn't have been because they return google search results and not bing
Nope I tried it precisely when DDG was out and it was working.... Images were not so those may have come from Bing... But regular searches were working
Weird, it was out when I tried it
Well they official word is that it was intermittent... Maybe I just got lucky when testing
I'm finding SearXNG to be very good. It operates like dogpile used to but is actually functional and it pretty much entirely squelches product placement results. I actually have to manually go to google if I want to get product listings for something.
this is the first i hear of Arc, is it available as an iOS app only?
Seems to only have an iOS app right now. There is a desktop version for Windows and MacOS Here.
It is annoying that it wants to send you the download link by email though.
Edit: Here is an example of how the results look when asking for opening times of a book store in my city.
That looks clean, thanks for posting the screenshot!
Anytime. This is what search should be. You shouldn’t have to click into links for such simple information.