Fed Up With Commercial Nonsense That Google Returns?

[mosaix]

I think I have said here before on Chrons that I am fed up with some of the commercial nonsense that Google returns in response to a query.

Google's security policy changes in the future will mean your searches responses be will become even more commercialised.

I've been looking round for an alternative for a while and have stumbled on:

http://duckduckgo.com/

There's no tracking and no advertising!

Also, reading what they don't do in their 'privacy policy' gives you an indication of what the other search engines do do!

[Dozmonic]

Looks to be a good no-nonsense search engine, I may start using it :-)

[The Judge]

Wow! That is great, mosaix. I've just tried ducking** the title of my book, as it's plastered all over my website. When I've googled it in the past, I've always been at least 3 pages back, usually in the mid-teens, and the last time I wasn't in the first 30 pages -- but there were bucket loads of things in those pages which didn't have any relation to the words I actually typed. Using this, I'm the third one down!

Now all we've got to do is make people see the sense of ducking.**


** that's like googling, only with ducks.

[mosaix]

Just changed my region to 'UK' and results are even better.

[Vertigo]

Isn't it funny how things go full circle? I remember when Google first came along everyone switched to it because it got better results and was perceived as being unbiased by commercial interests. Now Google has come to dominate the search engines and its "good boy" image is becoming tarnished giving new engines an opportunity.

[Perpetual Man]

I've had a look and swapped over. It was quite impressive to start with and I'll give it a try for a few days.

[Dave]

I also want to give it a try, but on my first attempt the first result was a "sponsored link" which had nothing to do with the query so I can't say that it is free of commercial nonsense.

[mosaix]

Originally Posted by Dave

I also want to give it a try, but on my first attempt the first result was a "sponsored link" which had nothing to do with the query so I can't say that it is free of commercial nonsense.

Yes, unfortunately, a couple of mine seem to have returned a sponsored link. But never more than one. Let's hope it stays that way.

[alchemist]

I'll give it a go too.

The first thing I looked at was my own name and it brought up an author!! Not me though Time to make up a middle name.

[mosaix]

The good news is if you search for (nearly said google!) 'science fiction forum', Chronicles is first in the list! And no sponsored link!

[Metryq]

Commercial listings don't bother me so much as biased searches. It's bad enough getting incomplete or distorted reporting from "professional" news sites. It is unforgivable to get such bias in a search engine. Google: do know evil.™

(Let's hope we never have to cry "fowl" over this new engine.)

[Ursa major]

Shouldn't that Gogol () motto be "Do No Evil With No Monetary Value"?

[Interference]

It sounds like an excellent alternative.

I shall google it at once......

[Warren_Paul]

I like how it auto-loads results when you scroll, hated having to go next page on google.

You can look on Google's "new" privacy terms, its quite amusing because they talk about how they do EVERYTHING DuckDuckGo was talking about. Pretty much Google is the complete opposite to DuckDuckGo


Did my own look around and so far nothing appears to beat DuckDuckGo on privacy. Its a good search engine, that occasional 1 sponsored link the only form of advertising.

[Perpetual Man]

Well I've had a little play and am quite impressed.

Typed in my own name and discovered just how common it is!

That being said I changed the region to UK, typed in Perpetual Man and my underused website was the first one up! Now that was impressive!