[zizek23]

The thing with Duckduckgo is the choice has to be ideological or you will do a search again on Google again just to ensure you are not missing out.

This is Google marketing and brand perception at work because Google results of late, 3 years, have been unimpressive and you have to sift through pages of useless links and content to find any relevant information beyond the usual suspects one already knows, so their intensive spyware operations doesn't seem to help search quality.

It's surprising there are not more experimental search projects. One would have expected a steady stream of regular attempts but not a single credible effort exists. There was once an alternative search project called Cuil that just seemed to fizzle off.

[i_cant_speel]

I have to say, I go to the second page of Google search results maybe once every couple months. I'm not sure what you are searching for but that has not been my experience at all. It seems to always be getting better.

[captainmuon]

Sometimes I think there should be a search engine that has a button "these results are not satisfactory". When you click it, you can describe in detail what you were looking for... and hordes of cheap minimum wage or outsourced workers work 24/7 on these reports. Culling spammy search results, boosting good links, etc.. Solve what Google was always claiming to do purely algorithmically, with additional brute force labour.

(Actually, I suspect that a major ingredient of Google and Facebooks "algorithms" are really human reviewers... they want to keep this fact secret since human reviewers are responsible for judgement, whereas algorithms still count as impartial. This is not true of course, but it is the perception.)

[482794793792894]

A few off the top of my head:

Proxied (therefore non-personalized) Google results: https://www.startpage.com/

Heavily privacy-focused, even proxying content: https://www.ixquick.eu/

Meta search engine with very feature-rich search, self-hostable: https://searx.me/

Search engine with very feature-rich search result pages: https://www.qwant.com/

Not yet released, peer-to-peer search: http://pearsearch.org/