Decent Search Engines (That are not Google.)

An information monopoly (or near monopoly) is a dangerous thing. In light of that, here are some search engines to try:

I used to use ScrubTheWeb a lot, but they closed last year and became a directory. If you're interested in directories, I'd suggest Curlie, a successor to DMOZ.

I use Gigablast fairly often, but usually the results are only OK. The engine has links to Google, Bing, and Yandex tho, so you can re-run the query on those engines. Gigablast does have fairly good support for advanced queries, which Google seems to have given up on.

Yandex is a Russian search engine with an English version. Popular in Russia; they're actually beating Google over there.

Qwant is a French search engine. There's an English version. It has a unique layout, but the results are kinda like Google 10-15 years ago; nice, but you'll see a ton of product listings.

Exalead's still online, but the results aren't as relevant as I'd like, and once you get past the 1st page you'll see a lot of dead links.

NorthernLight re-launched a public version of their engine, but it only searches through recent business news articles; it's meant as a tech demo.

Mojeek is a British search engine. Not great, but not bad. Returns a lot of list articles.

Entireweb is actually pretty good. Not sure if they're a metasearch engine now, but the results seem unique.

DuckDuckGo - Use them on my phone. Usually mirrors Bing or Google. They do have a crawler tho, so some results may be unique.

Thunderstone's Web Site Catalog is cool if you just want to find sites, but it has a lot of dead links and parked domains.

Apexoo is also cool, if you need sites instead of pages. Index is a bit small; usually only returns 50 sites.

Yippy seems to have their own index now. Has a conservative bias, but nice clustering.

iSeek mixes their results with Google's and provides clustering. I like their clustering a bit more that Yippie's.

Bubblehunt - Returns lists of sites added/checked by volunteers.

AllTheInternet - Seems to have decent, unique results. Portal-like layout. Gives you the option of searching their engine or a few other major sites/engines. Also operates SearchALot, not to be confused with Search.alot, which is a browser hijacker.

Yooip - Public demo of an open source search engine. 1st page looks good, but 2nd page repeats most of the 1st page's results, as does the 3rd & 4th page.

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