Seriously, I am inclined to stop using Gooogle just because of their "Net neutrality" posture. I want to find alternatives, I know about Bing, Yahoo, but want to find out what people are using besides Goooogle
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-green/breaking-google-goes-evil_b_676021.html
I have tried DuckDuckGo, Blekko and Bing, all for about a month each.<p>I recommend Bing.<p>The thing that you almost forget after using Google forever is that they can always pull up relevant links to what you want, even from ancient forum posts if it's a really esoteric issue that only 5 people have ever had.<p>DuckDuckGo is decent, but it's no where near Google in that capability. Blekko not even close to DDG. (I have been using Blekko for my default search engine for a week or two now, but I almost always have to revert back to Google, except for really obvious results that I could probably pull up without a search engine entirely. I feel bad saying it, but it really isn't that good. Hopefully they keep working on it, though. )<p>Bing, on the other hand, was almost neck and neck with Google; it was only very occasionally that I would revert back to Google, and I used Bing for perhaps a month. I theorize that this is because Bing has millions (billions?) of Microsoft dollars behind it, way more than any other competing search engine.<p>I think I'm going to go back to DDG for a bit. I only used it a few months ago; I'm interested to see if it's gotten better.
Well you gotta try DuckDuckGo: <a href="http://duckduckgo.com/?t=mattc58" rel="nofollow">http://duckduckgo.com/?t=mattc58</a><p>I've switched to it for most of my ad hoc searching. Occasionally I use Google still for some things.<p>I also though have 4 separate google accounts for email, which I can't really get away from. Well I guess I could but I probably won't for a while.
Search: DuckDuckGo works well, only occasionally do I revert to Google for general searches.<p>Image search: ? Devilfinder can be useful, sometimes, but mostly gives NSFW results.<p>Voice: ? Voxox is such a bloated piece of software, but also offers Fax (when will it die? please?)<p>Mail: oh there are plenty of alternatives, none half as good. Then again, I'm a proud mutt user ;)<p>Calendar: Airset? Nah, only desktop apps compare.<p>Reader: I guess I'll go back to my Sage Firefox plugin.<p>Browser: Opera or Firefox. But to run Webkit on Linux what? Midori? that crashes every other page load.
Bing is actually a very nice search engine. It occasionally outperforms google in certain aspects of search, and has some extremely useful features that google doesn't have, although you'll have to dig around the site to find these (such as farecast, and the visual search).<p>I still recommend google for things such as technological search. For the majority of tail queries google still does better.<p>DuckDuckGo on the other hand is a nice search engine. However, it is objectively not as good at finding results as the other too. You can use statistical measures with RMSE and human rated errors to measure the accuracy of the machine learning and results pages that turn up in a search engine. DuckDuckGo is not even on the radar for google or microsoft because its core product--search--isn't even on the same level as the other two.
Try the English version of Yandex (<a href="http://www.yandex.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.yandex.com/</a>) - the Russian search engine. They just released it one day fully functioning. It's not a complete alternative, but it's interesting and worth a try...
I've been using Bing for search on both desktop and my iPhone, ever since it became an option in Safari. It's actually pretty good. At first I would flip back to Google pretty often when I doubted the quality of the Bing results, but the Google results were rarely better (subjectively) and were sometimes worse in such cases.
It's been almost a year since I switched to DuckDuckGo (<a href="http://www.cloudknow.com/2010/04/duckduckgo-as-my-primary-search-engine/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cloudknow.com/2010/04/duckduckgo-as-my-primary-se...</a>)<p>Heck, if Gabriel started charging users for the service, I would gladly pay him.
I think people aren't looking at the bigger picture here... In 5 years the internet is going to look incredibly different than it does today - regardless of Google's, Verizon's or the FCC's position on "Net Neutrality".<p>Whether it's IBM's laser/light data transfer technology (<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/202018/intel_turns_to_light_to_transfer_data_inside_pcs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/article/202018/intel_turns_to_light_t...</a>) or something we haven't even seen yet, the power of innovation will make the net neutrality argument (almost) irrelevant.<p>You should choose the product that best fits your needs. Also, do you really think Microsoft is less 'evil' than Google? I'm driven crazy every day by Microsoft products and their business practices!
Many people in this thread recommend Bing, which may be a good search engine... However, the reason you are switching is not to find a better search engine, but to make a political statement. In that light, recommending a Microsoft search engine seems a bit odd. I don't want to go all Slashdot "Micro$oft sux" here, but... if one thinks Google is evil because of this net neutrality thing, then what is Microsoft, whose track record is about ten times worse?
Bing is fine for search most of the time, and the odd time when it isn't I revert to Google. The thing I don't have a replacement for is Google Calendar which is great. But: I don't like Google knowing exactly what I'm doing every day!
If you use the search engine, but no other feature including clicking on their ads, you are actually costing them money, are you not?<p>That said you should probably search for inconsequential things rather than not use them at all.
Blekko has been awesome for me when Google fails. The reason I use them is that DuckDuckGo and Google have a very large overlap in the result set, while Blekko does not, so it is a perfect site to go to when Google is being hit by too much SEO spam.
IMHO, I am more concerned about Google Apps. If they decide to do something "evil" on it, then I am dead.<p>Google Search on the other hand; I can use Bing or other alternatives easily without actual loss.
I've seen a lot of responses recommending Bing. What is Microsoft's stance on net neutrality? Aren't they the company that tried to prevent other web browsers from being installed on their OS back in 98?<p>Don't get me wrong, my business is enmeshed with google now and I'm looking for alternatives, but if the problem is with Google's political stance on net neutrality wouldn't all these recommendations be incomplete without including a statement on the company's political stance with regards to net neutrality?
Search is one thing but what I'm uncomfortable with is how much of my personal stuff is stored on Google, stuff like mail, rss feeds (and the current read/unread state), calendars, docs, etc. I was a bit uncomfortable before and the Buzz fiasco and the recent uproar over Net Neutrality hasn't exactly eased my mind.<p>I would like to run my own servers for the above functionality but don't want the overhead of managing machines and backups. I could be interested in a package of products that runs the software in the cloud and configured to use my own domain name and stores data on my own S3/dropbox. In a perfect world it would be easy to switch providers for the various layers. I'm sure this is technically feasible today but I'm talking about an easy to use setup, ease of use being totally subjective of course.<p>I wouldn't necessarily object to using Google for one of the above layers or services, I just don't like one company having all of it.
I've been trying to wean myself of the google habit but I find myself returning to them over and over again. So far nobody seems to do search as good as they do.<p>Maybe the only way to get rid of google is to accept that you won't be finding things as easily any more. But that would automatically give everybody a competitive advantage over you.
I'm curious to see the quality of Blekko search which is supposed to be launching soon...<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the-blekko-search-engine-prepares-to-launch/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the-blekk...</a>
I have been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for a few months now, after having given it a second chance. At this rate, I find the result sets good enough that I only turn to Google for maybe 1 in 40 searches.<p>The number one reason to use DDG: The developer is friendly and accessible. I don't expect you could get a personal response to a feature request or comment from Bing or Google.<p>Mailwise, I recently set up my own mail server, so that has let me begin phasing my GMail account out. As far as spam control goes, Bogofilter has served me extremely well for years.
This doesn't exactly answer your question, but this Bing-based live search is pretty awesome: <a href="http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/" rel="nofollow">http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/</a>
Search is easy. Just use Bing. It's good enough and better in many respects. The bigger problem is finding replacing Gmail, Docs, Reader, GCal, Maps, Analytics, YouTube, Finance, Picasa, Android, etc. My life is tied to Google. Search is tiny compared to the other invaluable services I use.<p>Even if I find replacements for all these services online, there is also the desktop and mobile integration question. MS talks a lot about "cloud computing" but I've yet to see it from them. With Google, however, I am able to access all my data across multiple devices.
I did an experiment on this last year. Both Y!S and ask.com (of all things) came out as reasonable alternatives. Bing didn't. Things may have changed by now.<p><a href="http://canonical.org/~kragen/search-comparison-2009.html" rel="nofollow">http://canonical.org/~kragen/search-comparison-2009.html</a>
This seems more and more like the Quit Facebook movement, and will inevitably fail in the end. There is no real alternative to Google. DDG and Blekko are nice for a change but can definitely not replace it. And for me, Google > Bing.
I like Bing myself. i don't use it much yet, but when i do, it seems to work pretty well.<p>So far, Bing is kind of like the lifeboat on the good ship Google. I don't use it on a daily basis, but I'm sure glad its there.
If you're going to switch search engines, you should start blocking out Google advertising and analytics services as well; AdBlockPlus and an /etc/hosts killfile are good places to start.
Honestly, the biggest thing that stopped me from using Bing was the interface and the left navigation bar. The subtle thing prevented me from transitioning from Google.
while there's not a solution for plain web search yet, unscatter.com has a great interface for finding the most recent information about topics. Web search is actually the next large piece I will be adding. It is primarily powered by Bing because of their API limits, ie: none. For web specifically the real advantage will be the tab based user interface I am working on
That's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you politically disagree with the company.
BTW, "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing. Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government regulations tend to not end good.