Am I the only one who finds it depressing that the main alternative to Google is Microsoft?<p>Why couldn't there be a search engine run by a non-profit, which does not treat its users like commodities, which respects its users' privacy, does not track them, does not advertise, and is run for the benefit of its users, not for its own benefit?
Just switch to duckduckgo already. You don't need either of the mentioned search engines. I switched completely a couple of weeks ago and I haven't had a problem searching for _anything_.<p>I have a hard time seeing what people think Google does so magically that they see duckduckgo (or any alternative, really) failing at. You either get what you search for or you don't. On top of that you can get to a result more easily by using !bang stuff on duckduckgo.
I agree with gnosis...it is depressing. I guess the point I was trying to make is that Google is not the only player in this game, and from a dev perspective, it's important to pay attention to Bing and optimize your SEO for Bing as well. From a consumer's perspective, given the two choices - I think people would see some advantages from Bing. But I agree - it would be amazing to have a non-profit search engine, something ran by Mozilla maybe..
The article doesn't mention any measures to escape particular search engine bubbles. It seems unfair to make a comparison without doing that first.<p>I'm more interested in projects like blind search (<a href="http://blindsearch.fejus.com/" rel="nofollow">http://blindsearch.fejus.com/</a>)
The good news is there is <a href="http://yacy.net/en/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://yacy.net/en/index.html</a><p>It's a peer to peer search engine without any of the privacy problems that come with using Google or, god forbid, bing.<p>The bad news is that it requires some effort and dedication from its users. Hopefully recent events will convince more people to give it a try.