It sounds interesting, and will probably be the search engine which I try next.īrave: I've tried their browser but didn't realize they also have a search engine. Apparently they use Google search results but without the tracking. Startpage: I recently found out about this one. Even if they do eventually launch here, they've already lost me. I don't know why they decided to do that but this makes me irrationally angry. From the phrasing it sounds like they made the decision to geo-block me. Qwant: When trying to access Qwant I get an ugly message saying "Unfortunately we are not yet available in your country". Even if it's not perfect, at least it plants trees. For now though I've made Ecosia the default search engine on both my phone and desktop. So does Bing (which Ecosia is based on), so it's disappointing that Ecosia does not have any of that. Google, DDG, Startpage all support these features. I'm used to doing currency conversions in the search bar, as well as calculations, unit conversions and getting the aforementioned instant answers. On the other hand, Ecosia lacks any instant results feature. So while I haven't counted, it feels like I'm using #g far less often with Ecosia compared to DDG. Ecosia requires you to put search tags only in the end). The main difference is just that you use '#' instead of '!' (another minor difference I found is that DDG's bangs work even if you put them in the middle of your query. Ecosia has a search tags feature that works very similarly to DDG's tags. But so far, it feels like Ecosia is bringing me far better results than DDG - both in English and in my native language. Now my comparison is just based on every day use, I haven't done close examination of the results I'm getting. So I switched to Ecosia as my default a few weeks ago. Microsoft does seem to put a lot of effort into Bing and they also have a strong presence in my country, so I was expecting better results. Ecosia's search results are based on Bing, a huge search engine that I've never really tried. Of course it's still better than Google, but not as good as DDG. On the other hand I've seen some criticism of their privacy policy. Although these are some strong claims, apparently they really do plant trees. This website claims to be a private search engine that uses its revenue to plant trees. Google and Microsoft have a big presence in my country, but DDG not so much.Įcosia: so next I tried out Ecosia. Results were especially bad at my native language. So I found myself too often wanting to add !g to my search. DDG's other standout feature is bangs, where if you add something like !g to your search query then you get redirected to Google search results (Firefox also has this feature now). However the actual search results often left me disappointed. I really liked the interface DDG's Instant Answers works very well, as good as Google's equivalent feature (called Featured Snippets) and sometimes better. I switched to it as the default on my phone's browser, and at the same time I also switched from Chrome to Firefox (I love the new Firefox for Android by the way, but it's not what this comment is about). Privacy is one reason but another one is that I'm feeling like Google's search results are not as good as they used to be.ĭuckDuckGo: this seemed like the most popular privacy focused search engine, so I tried this one first. I still use Google but am trying to use it less now. So I've been trying different search engines for the past few months. The auto-completion when typing into the search box is pretty basic with Startpage though and their image search does not allow filtering by date. I also occasionally use Bing or Yandex for reverse image searches. So I now use Startpage pretty much exclusively except times when I need to do a custom search by date range – for that I still use Google, as StartPage only allows filtering by day/week/month/year. ( Startpage uses Google for its search results, which explains why I find their search results to be good). If you want good results and do care about privacy. If you want the best search results and are less concerned about privacy.Ģ) Startpage search. So basically, my conclusions are currently:ġ) Google search. With the others (which are mainly Bing-based), although they appear to work OK on the surface at first, I always found myself going back to Google where the results were better – especially when doing more advanced or obscure searches. I've tested every search engine I can find for weeks at a time and there have only been two search engines that I am OK using as my full-time search engine. What you said in your comment matches my findings too.
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