| Good thread, there are more and more alternatives as Google has been in decline for years in terms of quality of results. This decline is out in the open as can be easily seen on Google itself. DuckDuckGo is very good and they have been steady in terms of their results and growth for years. Kagi is nice too (I know the team as a disclaimer but their effort is a good one). You.com and Neeva, as well as others are getting in there too. I founded a distributed search engine Wowd.com more than 10 years ago but we were a decade too early, not that it really matters now. In terms of shameless plugs I also suggest YottaAnswers (I am a founder) which is a smart AI system capable of returning billions of direct answers. Direct answering is key as the open Web with high quality organic links is long gone and search results with blue links and keyword matching are now a legacy technology. A key question is then how many direct answers (in infoboxes, bolded) Google is currently capable of. I think the answer is surprisingly small, around 15-20B in my professional opinion. That is not a small number per se, but is so compared to Google's enormous resources ($135B+ cash, 1M+ servers, 16K+ PhDs, 60T+ webpages, 10T+ user clicks ...) Of course I invite all parties to shed more light my estimate above as Google keeps it a closely guarded secret. Voltaire famously said more than two centuries ago that all fiat currencies inevitably tend to their intrinsic value, which is zero. I propose a modified variant for ads, that also tend to the same intrinsic value eventually. |