[PLUG-TALK] Is there an alternative to Google?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 15 Oct 2011 19:23:07 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>On Sat, 15 Oct 2011, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
>> Does anyone know which search engines are better than others, like
>> ratings?

>  Does a Google search for search engine ranking self-select itself
> as #1?

"Search engine ranking" yielded only sites dedicated to how a site
owner can increase the Google ranking of the site. But when I changed
it to "search engine popularity" I got a few useful hits. 

For the US Google is the biggest, although it has been slipping for the
past year. From

http://searchengineland.com/library/stats/stats-popularity

I found:

One Year Later, Bing-Powered Search Takes 4% Market Share From Google

Sep 8, 2011 at 7:39pm ET by Matt McGee
It's been a year since Bing began powering the natural search results
on Yahoo and the combination has gained a little more than 4% market
share in the U.S. since then. Google has dropped more than six
percentage points in the same time period. All of that is according to
the latest Experian Hitwise report, which covers US search activity in
August. Hitwise says Bing-powered search accounted for 28.99% of all
searches last month, up from 28.05% the previous month. But in the
bigger picture, Bing-powered search has upped its market share by about
4% since Yahoo began using Bing's sear [...] 

> There used to be ask.com, but I've no idea if it still exists.

I couldn't find much for Ask.com, but I spent a couple hours playing
with Yahoo! and Bing. I hate to say it, but I like the way the Bing
search results page is organized. Nice and clean. Yahoo is a little
more cluttered, although not as bad as Google has become. However, both
have a failing in the advanced search - you cannot specify a date range
very well. Your only choices are the past day, the past week, and the
past month. This doesn't work well when you are trying to find the
solution to a software problem and you need to filter only pages with
dates within the past year. So often I search on a problem with a
driver or a module and most of the pages have had no activity since
2005. And none of them tell you on the search results page what the
date of the last update has been, so your only choice is to use
Advanced Search to specify the date range - or spend hours going to
useless sites.

Bing has another advantage in allowing me to set my location to
Afghanistan. Google took the instruction, but the first time I used it
after changing my location I noticed that it had changed me back to
Portland, Oregon. Dammit Google, where I am located is none of your
business. If I want sites for Portland businesses I'll add "Portland"
to the search. And Firefox has an option in about:config where you can
disable geolocation. I did so, restarted Firefox, and Google still says
I am in Portland.

None of them honor + and -. I searched on +"bone marrow" -transplant,
-donor - donation -donate -"blood cells", and almost all the pages were
about how to donate bone marrow, with many about how blood cells are
formed. On the third page of the results I finally found a useful link.

Google is getting too much hubris, and Yahoo/Bing are Microsoft, which
defines corporate hubris. What's a dude to do?