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by cmcnally 3855 days ago
Have you tried DuckDuckGo? With the exception of maps and directions, I actually prefer their search experience to Google's.
4 comments

It's been my home page for years. Originally i would still often go directly to google for better results, but each year the amount of times I'd do that decreased. Now I'm actually really happy with DDG results, and when I do perform the same search on Google, it ends up being less accurate. I think this is because Google has such a huge belief that personalization yields accuracy, but it doesn't. Past trends don't always predict future patterns. Google gimped their search engine in my totally honest opinion. It's completely useless until I filter for "Verbatim Search", because they keep guessing at synonyms for my search terms and randomly leaving out terms their algorithm thinks aren't important to me. Google.com is such a downright horrible experience for me, a once wonderful gateway that is now just a necessary evil at best.
There came a moment when I realized that I no longer used Google to "google" things.
Well worded. I couldn't agree more.
I just started trying DDG after using Bing for a while. DuckDuckGo is pretty solid, and I find the fact that anyone can submit new 'instant answers' type features to the search engine to be intriguing and novel. Google and Bing only get smarter if Googlers and Microsoft employees write it, but anyone can make DuckDuckGo better. (Though it's not fully open source.)
I do use it on handhelds (my browser of choice happened to change its default search engine to Bing, which I dislike and distrust, and used to crash on Google). It feels a little too off in its search results for my usual desktop work.
Unfortunately ddg is not as good as Google for non English searches.