Frustrated with Google?

Here's my take on 21 alternatives and the 2 keepers I found

In spite of their cool logo art and Google Images, I’ve grown dissatisfied with Google as a search engine … the sponsored responses, repetition, and difficulty of finding useful information seem to be getting worse. So, on a quiet Sunday morning I decided to see if I could find something more effective using the following article as my guide.

21 Great Search Engines You Can Use Instead Of Google

I decided to run a test on all of them using a question related to the Cherán project I’m working on. (Read more here.)

Here’s the question; What role do murals play in the democratic experiment occurring in Cherán, Mexico?

Starting with Google on Chrome, the results provided several useful articles and little noise, however, the first listing was 7 years old and didn’t pick up the major word Cherán. 

So I reworded the question: In Cherán, MX, what role do murals play in the democratic experiment there?

That rewording did not change the results much. So, here is the same question on the 21 alternatives.

Spoiler: This took a LOT longer than I expected and made me more impressed with Google, in spite of its frustrations. I am going to add Yandex  when I want to go deeper into a subject and maybe Bing as a starter, at least until I get a better understanding of it. Lots of these offer privacy and no ads, but that wasn’t my motivation so I didn’t make note of them. The article offers that information.

This exercise reminded me of how grateful I am to have the internet to pamper my curiosity.

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An AI-Powered Search Engine

1. You.com … one, well-written overview of the topic, similar to what I would get on ChatGPT

A Revenue-Sharing Search Engine

2. Yep.com … while apparently helping creators, results were not useful

A Copyright-Free Search Engine

3. Openverse … no results

**4. Bing.com … useful articles but missed several turned up by google … need to use both but I like the format

5. Yahoo.com … similar to google

Privacy focused searches

6. DuckDuckGo … some unique articles

7. Startpage.com … clean look, missed a lot of articles

8. Swisscows.com … anonymous; non responsive

9. Gibiru.com … one article only found here made a difference, but this would never be a replacement for Google

Knowledge-Based Search Engines

10. Wiki.com … notice that it wasn’t secure

11. Twitter.com … didn’t bother with this one.

12. Slideshare.com … no results

13. WaybackMachine … for old searches, not used

Browser-Based Search

14. Brave … very quick, requires download, picked up some small mag articles but not very useful

15. Neeva has joined snowflake

16. WolframAlpha … computational knowledge, not used

17. searX … no results

International Search Engines

18. Baidu … Chinese unreadable

**19. Yandex … Russia focused … a lot of obscure material I would never have found in other places. Will use this one again.

20. Sogou … Chinese, unreadable

21. Naver … Korea, unreadable

**22. Google Scholar … added by a friend

** Short List to use for important searches.