I thought it’d be relevant to post this since a growing population of devs has been building new engines and growing dissatisfied with Google.
Marginalia gained some attention on Lobsters; some others that the Lobsters crowd might find interesting are Gigablast, Alexandria, and Chatnoir, which are open-source.
https://searchcode.com/ is one of them. I haven’t looked into whether it crawls “the web” or it only has a few specific sources; if the former is true I might add it to “non-generalist search”.
This survey is excellent. For me it highlights how important Bing is; it really is the only deep alternative to Google. I try using Bing about once a year (most recently, via Neeva) and always come away disappointed. It’s fairly good but Google is still better.
One gives a bunch of pages specifically about the search query, and one does not. Sometimes ddg gives poor results (such as when multiple terms must all be present, or when a specific phrase must be present) but it clearly has much better results. I experimented with other terms and had similarly bad performance.
Is there a larger list of engines that didn’t make the cut? For instance I didn’t see you.com on the list and I was wondering if it was missed or excluded.
Edit I know that there is a list of excluded search engines, but since I didn’t see specific search engines I was just wondering
You.com is bing-powered, AFAICT. I’ll add it under Bing since you’re not the first to ask. Diff.
I’ve mostly stopped adding Bing-based engines since there are just too many. I also excluded engines powered by client-side Google Custom Search since those are just Google clients that perform the search from your computer.
I’m tracking some queries on You.com over time to see if they diverge from Bing.
Oh damn you seem to be right. I was pretty sure that you.com had their own index, but it seems like I was wrong.
Sorry to bother you with this I should have done better research beforehand, but I really thought I remembered that it had its own index.
Wow, thanks a lot for that list! From my (unsuccessful) research, I had assumed there were very few alternatives to the big ones. I’m happy that I got proved wrong.
I’ll have fun experimenting with those, as yandex has been putting up russian captchas for a while, making it unusable for me :(
I thought it’d be relevant to post this since a growing population of devs has been building new engines and growing dissatisfied with Google.
Marginalia gained some attention on Lobsters; some others that the Lobsters crowd might find interesting are Gigablast, Alexandria, and Chatnoir, which are open-source.
Thanks, this is a great write up!
As competitors grow share against GitHub, I’d love to see an open source forge focused search engine or option on another search engine.
Have you seen any of these engines that could provide this? If not, and you find one in the future, please share. :)
https://searchcode.com/ is one of them. I haven’t looked into whether it crawls “the web” or it only has a few specific sources; if the former is true I might add it to “non-generalist search”.
I should clarify that I want to search for projects, not code. Thanks though that looks interesting!
Update: added the new Fairsearch engine, by Ahrefs. It was previously in “upcoming engines” but has since gone live; a reader just pinged me.
This survey is excellent. For me it highlights how important Bing is; it really is the only deep alternative to Google. I try using Bing about once a year (most recently, via Neeva) and always come away disappointed. It’s fairly good but Google is still better.
Not sure why Wiby doesn’t index my site!
Unlike others in the list, Wiby and SearchMySite are mostly limited to user-submitted sites. You’ll have to submit your own site and wait.
If that doesn’t work out, you could contact the admins.
I did submit it, months ago.
I submitted mine months ago as well but it seems to show up. Try submitting again?
I wonder if there was a grudge or other personal reason for them nixing it.
Mojeek is rated highly, but it gives poor results. For example, compare
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pecl+termination
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=pecl+termination
One gives a bunch of pages specifically about the search query, and one does not. Sometimes ddg gives poor results (such as when multiple terms must all be present, or when a specific phrase must be present) but it clearly has much better results. I experimented with other terms and had similarly bad performance.
Nice writeup. Thx.
Is there a larger list of engines that didn’t make the cut? For instance I didn’t see you.com on the list and I was wondering if it was missed or excluded.
Edit I know that there is a list of excluded search engines, but since I didn’t see specific search engines I was just wondering
You.com is bing-powered, AFAICT. I’ll add it under Bing since you’re not the first to ask. Diff.
I’ve mostly stopped adding Bing-based engines since there are just too many. I also excluded engines powered by client-side Google Custom Search since those are just Google clients that perform the search from your computer.
I’m tracking some queries on You.com over time to see if they diverge from Bing.
Oh damn you seem to be right. I was pretty sure that you.com had their own index, but it seems like I was wrong. Sorry to bother you with this I should have done better research beforehand, but I really thought I remembered that it had its own index.
Anyway thank you for adding it.
Wow, thanks a lot for that list! From my (unsuccessful) research, I had assumed there were very few alternatives to the big ones. I’m happy that I got proved wrong.
I’ll have fun experimenting with those, as yandex has been putting up russian captchas for a while, making it unusable for me :(