I've used Duck Duck go for a long time because it doesn't track you. It's essentially a front end to Bing (lots of search engines are repackaging Google or Bing queries). Lately I've been trying Mojeek, who use their own crawler and have a detailed privacy and transparency policy that aligns with my values.
Anne Miller wrote:I like Mr Google because he is so smart. Actually he is using AI.
I wish there was a way to do a true Boolean search in Google, so that it would work the same as before they figured out how to "monetize" the search results to make bank. Having grown up in, and worked in, libraries in my mis-spent wayward youth, there is nothing like a good Boolean search to really focus search results. Google, back in the "don't be evil" days of yore, used to actually give such helpfully constrained results, instead of bought and paid for ersatz search results. Sometimes, the third or fourth page of search results will give some semblance of the results I'm looking for, but if I dig pages deep into the results, I keep being asked to verify that I'm not a robot by completing timewasting Captchas or checking boxes, and the results still aren't giving only what I asked for.
Unfortunately, whether I use the "Advanced" search or not, Google is more of an ad server than elsewise these days.
I'd love to know if there is a search engine which permits, even if it doesn't encourage, Boolean searches.
I want: "This phrase" OR "That term" NOT ("Some other thing" AND "Other stuff I don't want"). Sometimes, I really do want to search for results that are mis-spelled, rather than spell-corrected. Really. Because now, even if I insist I want mis-spelled results, I still get other stuff. Sometimes, technical acronyms which are close to actual English words are what I'm looking for, even if that isn't "trending" right now. Because most of what I am interested in is only trendy with a subset of, like, 10 people or something, worldwide, because I am weird that way.
Sigh...
I still mostly use Google, but only by force of habit, because back in the days of Netscape and Dogpile or Ask Jeeves or whatever other bygone organizer or indexer of the World Wide Web, Google was actually helpful and worked, so I'm stuck in that rut, and because other search engines I've tried tend to not work any better, but for other reasons. I should cut the umbilical, but I haven't.
I am open to suggestions, but I'm guessing that anything that works properly will be pay to play and more narrowly focused (i.e. Lexus Nexus).
Post by:autobot
Do the next thing next. That's a pretty good rule. Read the tiny ad, that's a pretty good rule, too.
The new gardening playing cards kickstarter is now live!
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