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Ask HN: What is an alternative to Google? Really.

75 points by inodeman ↗ HN
Seriously, I am inclined to stop using Gooogle just because of their "Net neutrality" posture. I want to find alternatives, I know about Bing, Yahoo, but want to find out what people are using besides Goooogle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-green/breaking-google-goes-evil_b_676021.html

124 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] thread
mattculbreth
Well you gotta try DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com/?t=mattc58

I've switched to it for most of my ad hoc searching. Occasionally I use Google still for some things.

I also though have 4 separate google accounts for email, which I can't really get away from. Well I guess I could but I probably won't for a while.

gphil
DuckDuckGo certainly does the trick for general web search, but like you I'm really tied in to Gmail/Talk/Reader for my personal life and Google Apps for Business for my work life. Unfortunately, replacing these isn't entirely up to me at this point and I imagine a lot of people are in this boat.
mike_h
The only thing keeping me on gmail right now is the spam filter, which seems to be the best on the planet. Can anyone recommend an alternative filter?

(been using DDG for search for about 6 months now, rarely if ever get better results on google)

ams6110
Do you really get that much spam? I've had the same email address since 1990, I use it pretty much everywhere, and I get maybe 10 spam emails a day, with no filters.
Pistos2
I find that extremely hard to believe. Do you have some very anomalous usage patterns, such as never using that address to register on websites, and never having it posted anywhere spider-crawlable on the Internet?

I'd wager that an address that is bot-scrapable would soon see dozens of spam messages a day, if not much more.

rufugee
I tried DDG for awhile, an honestly found the search results to be lacking compared to Google. YMMV.
jackowayed
Seconding this. DDG is awesome. The zero-click info is often very nice, I love the keyboard shortcuts (though there's a google keyboard shortcuts experiment), and !bang[1] is really awesome. There's a bunch of other occasionally-useful goodies[2]. It'll do disambiguation if you search something with many meanings (eg. Ruby). Infinite pagination.

I switched a month or 2 ago, and I've been very happy. And if I search for something and don't like the results, I hit / (the keyboard shortcut to select the text of the search box), hit right-arrow (to get my cursor to the end of the search box), add a "!g" to the end, and hit enter. And then I usually find that google's results are just as bad :)

1: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

2: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html

mmmmax
!bang is the most useful search feature since I'm Feeling Lucky. I submitted this exact feature to Google years ago, and DuckDuckGo's implementation of it caused me to switch search engines.
epi0Bauqu
Thx! Note that we've had I'm Feeling Ducky through !bang for a while (!+space+sarch), but the last few days I've made it even easier.

You can now do /+search, e.g. /slashdot or whatever. Also all the !bang commands now will take you right to the site if you don't follow them with a search, e.g. !a takes you to amazon.

mmmmax
Nice work, as usual, Gabriel.
xiongchiamiov
Meh. I don't see the point of using !amazon, for instance, when I already have a search in firefox for the same thing. Just 'o a foo' (as I'm using vimperator) and I'm on amazon.
nowarninglabel
Or just set a shortcut key to a search box (e.g., a for amazon's search), and you can shorten that to 'a foo'.
ElliotH
I use DuckDuckGo for pretty much all my day to day searching. Sometimes if I'm looking for a very specific page I still use Google - but just sticking !g on the end of your search makes that very easy.
jacquesm
I've been trying to wean myself of the google habit but I find myself returning to them over and over again. So far nobody seems to do search as good as they do.

Maybe the only way to get rid of google is to accept that you won't be finding things as easily any more. But that would automatically give everybody a competitive advantage over you.

dreur
and any other good webmail alternative to gmail? HN Startup anyone?
tmart
well there is zoho
da5e
Zoho Writer's docs are available offline as well as online which Google Docs aren't at the current time. And Zoho Creator is awesomely handy.
da5e
In addition, Zoho mail is ad-free and has offline capability using, oops, Gears.
alec
I hear rave reviews about the recently-revamped Hotmail, but haven't quite overcome my prejudice against the brand to try it.
mike_h
Any details on what you've heard good about it? It was so slow and poorly laid-out for me that I finally decided to trust Microsoft with my gmail address enough to let them forward my hotmail there.
chadgeidel
Hotmail user since the pre-gmail days here. It's actually pretty good. It's a little to "busy" for my tastes, but it runs well on every browser I tested it on. Hotmail also re-directs to a very good mobile site on the iPhone.

Full disclosure - I am paying like $20 per year or something for the "enhanced" service, but I don't even know what that includes any more. It used to be Outlook connectivity and more storage. I haven't used Outlook (at home) in years, and I don't think my account goes over the size of the free storage.

mhd
GMX[1] ain't that bad, if you like your webmail to look like a fake desktop client (cf. Yahoo Mail). Also has file storage etc. NB: I'm talking about gmx.com, if you live in Germany/Austria/Switzerland, you have to live with the inferior original service. Unless you register over a proxy, that is (access is possible, just registering is turned off).

I've become really fond of GMail's navigation, though. Beats desktop clients, although sup[1] wasn't that bad and you could probably do a lot with Emacs MUAs…

[1]: http://www.gmx.com

[2]: http://sup.rubyforge.org/

ams6110
I like fastmail.fm. Recently acquired by Opera, but no significant changes so far.
[dead] hockeybias
I wanted to like bing and I do use it.

But I find that for many things that I search on (hockey-related, for example) I more often than not get what I consider to be better results from google.

dennisgorelik
That's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you politically disagree with the company. BTW, "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing. Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government regulations tend to not end good.
makmanalp
Well, enforcing freedom and human rights also requires government regulation.
shadowfox
Hmm. I found this a little confusing.

> That's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you politically disagree with the company

Why would you continue to support a company whose policies you no longer support (if that was the case)?

> "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing

Can you explain a bit here?

> Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government regulations tend to not end good.

Almost any sort of "enforcing" requires government support for it to be legal. This includes property rights. So I am not sure what is the exact point here

notahacker
If you're using Google without clicking on their ads you're not exactly supporting them...
gasull
Wrong. You're helping them improve their search when you use it.
agentcoops
If you're giving Google data, you're most certainly supporting them.
dennisgorelik
> Why would you continue to support a company whose policies you no longer support

I use tools not because I want to support a company, but because the tool is useful to me.

Things can be legal without enforcing them. For example, you can breath air without government enforcing it. Or you can switch search engine providers without government enforcement.

More important observation here is that this particular article and discussion in comments is too politically charged (my comment above got even downvoted twice already). That's a bad sign and most likely nothing good would come out from this discussion.

viraptor
> I use tools not because I want to support a company, but because the tool is useful to me.

I guess it's about the balance. If I think that the company gains more than I do in that exchange (for example I get the data I need, but they get more money from ad views and more information to process), then they can convert that gain to introduce more policies I disagree with. If this is not in my interest, then maybe I should stop using the tool.

nostrademons
"Laws" also require government regulation, yet you wouldn't have much commerce without them.
othermaciej
I've been using Bing for search on both desktop and my iPhone, ever since it became an option in Safari. It's actually pretty good. At first I would flip back to Google pretty often when I doubted the quality of the Bing results, but the Google results were rarely better (subjectively) and were sometimes worse in such cases.
tome
Bing is fine for search most of the time, and the odd time when it isn't I revert to Google. The thing I don't have a replacement for is Google Calendar which is great. But: I don't like Google knowing exactly what I'm doing every day!
tjpick
not exactly sure about calendars specific features but you probably wouldn't have too hard a time running your own calendaring server
tome
I'm happy to run the server but I don't know what software to use.
tjpick
http://www.davical.org/ maybe an option, but getting a web based front-end may be a problem, if you need that.
tome
Unfortunately the "web based front-end" part of Google Calendar is the whole reason I use it.
tjpick
you may have luck with phpicalendar.
inodeman
All these links are awesome, any more?
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jchonphoenix
Bing is actually a very nice search engine. It occasionally outperforms google in certain aspects of search, and has some extremely useful features that google doesn't have, although you'll have to dig around the site to find these (such as farecast, and the visual search).

I still recommend google for things such as technological search. For the majority of tail queries google still does better.

DuckDuckGo on the other hand is a nice search engine. However, it is objectively not as good at finding results as the other too. You can use statistical measures with RMSE and human rated errors to measure the accuracy of the machine learning and results pages that turn up in a search engine. DuckDuckGo is not even on the radar for google or microsoft because its core product--search--isn't even on the same level as the other two.

johnfn
I have tried DuckDuckGo, Blekko and Bing, all for about a month each.

I recommend Bing.

The thing that you almost forget after using Google forever is that they can always pull up relevant links to what you want, even from ancient forum posts if it's a really esoteric issue that only 5 people have ever had.

DuckDuckGo is decent, but it's no where near Google in that capability. Blekko not even close to DDG. (I have been using Blekko for my default search engine for a week or two now, but I almost always have to revert back to Google, except for really obvious results that I could probably pull up without a search engine entirely. I feel bad saying it, but it really isn't that good. Hopefully they keep working on it, though. )

Bing, on the other hand, was almost neck and neck with Google; it was only very occasionally that I would revert back to Google, and I used Bing for perhaps a month. I theorize that this is because Bing has millions (billions?) of Microsoft dollars behind it, way more than any other competing search engine.

I think I'm going to go back to DDG for a bit. I only used it a few months ago; I'm interested to see if it's gotten better.

strebler
Agreed, Bing is my vote too...if only they could increase their coverage a bit!
_delirium
I'm not sure how widespread it is, but a handful of Bing blindspots I've run across are something they can't do anything about without violating robots.txt: a decent number of sites block all crawlers by default, but whitelist GoogleBot, presumably from a "we don't want to be crawled, but we do want to be googleable" line of thought.
bad_user
http://blogs.perl.org/users/cpan_testers/2010/01/msnbot-must...
_delirium
Yeah, MSNbot isn't very friendly, so they somewhat bring it on themselves. Both it and Yahoo's bot are much worse than Google at predicting likely page updates, as well--- on one of my sites that has a blank robots.txt, MSNbot accounts for >10x as many hits as GoogleBot, yet Google still manages to keep its index just as up to date.

Some people have had success with crawl-delay, though there are occasional reports of MSNbot not honoring that either.

jeromec
I tried taking the Bing challenge several months ago. I couldn't even make it for a week before going back to Google. Maybe it's time to try Bing again, but I'm really skeptical.
johnfn
Are you sure anti-Microsoft bias wasn't seeping in somewhere? (It used to be pretty easy, but it's getting harder with every new Google news article...) My roommate and I both tried it and didn't really get tripped up (and that was a while ago)
jeromec
No, I'm fully aware that everyone benefits if there are alternatives to a search monopoly. I was strictly evaluating the results. It may be that my searches are pretty demanding of a search engine, because they're not typically consumer oriented searches, but rather more obscure research and/or startup related. However, I do think I use a search engine fairly normally as well. For example, I remember in particular one search, I think it was the last one I did before giving up on Bing, President Obama was making a rally speech in support of Martha Coakley (who was famously defeated by Scott Brown) and he made reference to a certain buzz about a truck Scott Brown was supposed to be driving. I didn't know what the reference was to but Bing performed dismally. After several clicks and getting nowhere I Googled "Scott Brown truck" and Google almost missed it (it was a new topic at the time) but Google did have the ad in question near the bottom of page one, and led me to a page with a video of the ad.
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jsdalton
Same.

I lasted a few weeks, and would occasionally go back to Google when I wasn't satisfied with how a search turned out.

A few times I wanted to switch back to Google, but I couldn't justify it rationally to myself.

Around that time I bought a new laptop and used it to work away from home for a few days. I hadn't bothered to switch my default search engine away from Google. At some point, it dawned on me how happy I was to be back.

When I got home I promptly ended my experiment and have been back on Google ever since.

I will say that I didn't hate Bing or anything. If for some reason I was forced to use Bing instead of Google for now and ever after I'd probably be slightly bummed, but not much more than that.

jcromartie
Doesn't DDG use Google?
ehsanul
DDG uses Yahoo and Bing APIs, if I remember correctly.
sanderjd
Bing is really good, but is absolutely not a good alternative from a "taking a moral stand against evil corporations" point of view.
KeithMajhor
With the upcoming work on IE9 I'm inclined to disagree. I've bashed on Microsoft as much as anyone else but things are changing. They're in position to grab a lot of favor for their brand. I'd love to see the day when benevolent and Microsoft weren't antonyms.
neilk
What does IE9 have to do with anything?

In fact, more's the pity. Microsoft is quite capable of producing great and standards-compliant software, and they often deliberately choose not to do this.

Stop thinking about corporations in terms of 'evil' and 'good'. Start thinking about whether their interests are aligned with yours.

Google was 'good' for many years because their growth required an open, standards-compliant internet. That period is ending.

KeithMajhor
"Start thinking about whether their interests are aligned with yours."

You're definitely right about that. That's why I commented on Microsoft's attempt to play nice. It's also why I'm concerned about the new face of Google. The more we punish/reward companies based on their actions the more their actions will begin to suit us.

"Stop thinking about corporations in terms of 'evil' and 'good'"

No. If enough people start "thinking about corporations in terms of 'evil' and 'good'" then evil will fail. Capitalism is about getting people what they want and rewarding the people who made it happen. We just need to make sure that less technically inclined people also want "good".

Keyframe
Bing is great. I only REALLY miss two things on it. A spell checker like google has with suggested correction and a calculator along with currency converter. Also, I haven't found/don't know if bing has a suggestion based search like google has?

Maybe an online PDF/PPT viewer would be nice also for links that lead to those files.

epi0Bauqu
We now use Bing and BOSS so that if you're looking for obscure stuff that Bing has, you will find it in DDG. Please give me your feedback if you try it again.
johnfn
I just switched my search to DDG a few hours ago. This might be preliminary, but I don't think I'm going to switch back. The jump in quality in the last few months since I last used it is immense! I love all the programmer friendly features too (scraping from stackoverflow, etc). Really nice job.
will_critchlow
Try the English version of Yandex (http://www.yandex.com/) - the Russian search engine. They just released it one day fully functioning. It's not a complete alternative, but it's interesting and worth a try...
mmphosis
Yandex is popular and also Baidu (http://www.baidu.com/) - the Chinese search engine, no english version, but the search appears to work well regardless of language. You may see evidence of these two search engines crawling in your web server logs.
smallblacksun
If you have moral objections to Google, you don't want to be using Baidu.
run4yourlives
If you use the search engine, but no other feature including clicking on their ads, you are actually costing them money, are you not?

That said you should probably search for inconsequential things rather than not use them at all.

nuttendorfer
Have been using DDG for more general info and Google if I need to look something up (Errors, movie quotes etc)
SecretAgentMan
I've seen a lot of responses recommending Bing. What is Microsoft's stance on net neutrality? Aren't they the company that tried to prevent other web browsers from being installed on their OS back in 98?

Don't get me wrong, my business is enmeshed with google now and I'm looking for alternatives, but if the problem is with Google's political stance on net neutrality wouldn't all these recommendations be incomplete without including a statement on the company's political stance with regards to net neutrality?

jinushaun
Search is easy. Just use Bing. It's good enough and better in many respects. The bigger problem is finding replacing Gmail, Docs, Reader, GCal, Maps, Analytics, YouTube, Finance, Picasa, Android, etc. My life is tied to Google. Search is tiny compared to the other invaluable services I use.

Even if I find replacements for all these services online, there is also the desktop and mobile integration question. MS talks a lot about "cloud computing" but I've yet to see it from them. With Google, however, I am able to access all my data across multiple devices.