🚀 20240114 | Short Thoughts

But I from all these articles, and the associated comment threads, I’ve found a lot of alternative search engines, and I tried a few. I’ve started using Startpage as my Google proxy, for more anonymity. I’ve found that the results are not the same as directly querying Google, but they are pretty good and sometimes better (less sploggy, even). DuckDuckGo and Startpage/Google are still my go-tos, but I’ve added a few more back-up engines, too:

  • Mojeek has its own search index. sierdy called this the best alternative to the Google-Bing-Yandex index trifecta. I’d call it good, not great. Seems to surface mostly older pages (which can be useful sometimes). Has advanced search (remember that?), and a beta-version Substack specific search engine, which I haven’t tried. Less good for what’s the answer?, better for what else is out there?
  • Marginalia is maybe more interesting than “useful,” depending on why you are browsing. It focuses on indexing the “small web,” and as the developer says:
    It’s perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there. Instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn’t even know you were looking for.

Interesting, for fools like me that once tried DuckDuckGo, failed a couple of times and went back to Google.