Any good search engines out there? Google? You are dead to me! You no longer help me find what I want; you find what you think I want or what you think I should want. Any suggestions folks?

Seri on my iPhone is doing a great job. :-)

…One that makes me feel like I feel when I’m with you…

@Judi Unfortunately, I lease my soul to Verizon Wireless every two years and I am not eligible for an upgrade to an iPhone 4s or anything for another year or so.

@FutureMemory

One that won’t go away
One that won’t keep me up all night
One that won’t make me sleep all day

One that won’t make me nervous
Wonderin’ what to do
One that makes me feel like I feel when I’m with you
When I’m alone with you
I’m alone with you baby

LOL. We’ve almost guaranteed that I won’t get any serious answers to my question. I ask in social to give people wiggle room and then I never to get my questions answered. Anyway, my friend, it’s about time I headed over to your 20k party, isn’t it? I’m late, I’m late, I’m late

@lillycoyote Haha ;)

Here’s a serious answer for you:

I asked this very same question a few months ago, and also got the same answers: i.e., nada, zero, zip, zilch.

I agree that Google has sold out in recent years. Unfortunately, there’s nothing out there that is nearly as good. However, I sometimes use https://www.ixquick.com/ for the privacy it provides.

Thanks, @HungryGuy, for your serious answer. I have looked around on my own too and really have found nothing either. I was just hoping flutherites might have an answer for me.

http://duckduckgo.com/

It is a stupid name but it works well. I am also getting off the Google train.

@johnpowell That looks like a great alternative to Google…thanks!

@johnpowell thanks. All suggestions are welcome and duckduckgo.com is one I was not familiar with at all. Thanks. Google was a pretty stupid name too, but it worked until it didn’t anymore.

Anything in particular you aren’t finding, that maybe some of us could help you find?

@Aethelflaed Don’t patronize me, you with your brand new, fancy college education and everything :-). I am always looking for one thing or another. I doubt that you, little grasshopper, are really in a position to help me find what I want, whatever it may be. Sorry. I adore you. But nave no patience with your impertinence, little one.

You know I’m just having fun with you, hopefully.

I’m using duckduckgo as well right now. So far I’ve had no problems with it.

I haven’t tried Siri .. though it looks scary.

Google is increasingly delivering results weighted on hw much money Google gets for sending traffic to that site. It’s sad. I sometimes get better results with Bing, but they have the same money-motivated search results problem, nut not as severe yet.

I agree that Google doesn’t seem as helpful as it was, but it is very hard to stop using it!

Dogpile has been recommended to me as an alternative. You might find Blekko interesting as well.

Am I right to assume you don’t want to use Bing? It’s just that I think that one is the obvious alternative and you wouldn’t be asking this if you wanted that one. I could be wrong, though.

@AnonymousGirl I’ve used Bing and it doesn’t quite give my what I want. Maybe it’s just a me now being middle-aged thing. I want Google to be what it used to be. It was perfect for quite a while and it no longer is. When you get old, or at least middle-aged you want things to be the way they used to be, when they were just right. Or maybe that’s just me.

But yes, it really is hard to stop using Google. But I am increasingly disappointed in my search results when I do use it.

@lillycoyote, what’s wrong with Google now is admirably explained in the Vaidhyanathan book The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). The author explains it deeply and thoroughly, but I think this key sentence sums it up: “We are not Google’s customers: we are its product.”

Google’s core business, says Vaidhyanathan, is not search. It’s advertising; or rather, it’s delivery of an audience (us) to advertisers. The real value of our consumer profiles is not to make our search results more “relevant” (by skewing results based on our history—and on all the other information we supply to the search algorithms through our many uses of Google products) but to make us better and more focused targets of the advertising that comes through sponsored links.

So Google is doing very, very well at what it intends to do. It’s just that what it intends to do is not to give you better search results but to gather more information about you to make you more valuable to advertisers.

@lillycoyote I remember reading online that Facebook is the place to be—that it even beats out Google as a place to work. There are former Google employees who now work for Facebook. What I mean by this is there are people who worked for Google who seem to have been considered to be top Google employees with plenty of talent who have ditched working for Google in favour of working for Facebook. I would not be surprised if this has something to do with Google’s searches becoming lower in quality. I could be wrong, but… I don’t think it is a coincidence that Facebook’s search feature seems to get better and better over time (at least in my experience).

I do not think it is an middle-age thing at all, but I understand why you would say that. While I understand where you’re coming from, I feel that my own age proves it’s not a middle-age thing. I am a 21-year-old female. I use Google every single day. The quality in the searches has gone down. As young as I may be, I’ve noticed that as well. They also seem to think flashy is in for search.

As a person who loves change, this is saying a lot. The look-and-feel seems like they are trying too hard to make it too attractive, but that is exactly what makes the layout clunky and even ugly.

The original was simple and beautiful – exactly how a search engine should be. When one searches, why should he or she be distracted by things that are irrelevant to his or her searches? This Google layout provides too much noise. They also seem to have filtered out a lot of things that used to not be filtered out, at least from the top results. This is annoying.

Another thing that shows they are trying too hard is that there are “g” Google logos that have changed. Not all the “g” logos are the same across websites anymore. I don’t mean those cute Google logos on the Google search page itself that make Google unique and fun to come back to. I mean those little “g” logos on different sites that offer you to share on Google. Too much change… and much too fast. They need to slow down. Even as a young person, I don’t want to keep up with all those useless changes over a search engine. It is like they are trying too hard to be social.

What is wrong with Yahoo.com ? I use it all the time . I know that google harvests data so I have a couple of throwaway gmail accounts that I open when i am searching with google.
Someone at google is probably wondering why anyone wants toe nail polish for African bush elephants.

Sad to read this since one of the best computer science minds I know is now working for Google…..

(You could always ask a good reference librarian your questions. :-) Desk Set anyone?)

Wow @johnpowell that duckgo is interesting… It’s all one page.

Now for my web clients, it will be much easier for me to sell them my services to get their site to come up on the first page of a search engine… even if it’s 300 down on the list, it’s still the first page.

I like!

But what I don’t like is that it doesn’t tell you how many search results it found.

@johnpowell In a brief moment of narcissism, I duckduckgo-ed (or would that be duckduckwent?) my writer-name and sure do like the results better than Google’s!

I just ducked myself and my brother and our results were pretty comprehensive too.

Oh – I love it! “Go duck yourself!”

@janbb – [NSFW] Go ask a desk librarian for a list of the best videos of slave women forced to drink pee. Go on! I dare you :-0

s.t.o.p.s.f.o.l.l.o.w.i.n.g

@HungryGuy How weirded out would you be if said librarian came back with a list of that within 5 minutes?

@Aethelflaed – Very weirded out. But also impressed :-)

@HungryGuy Is 25,200,000 search results impressive enough?

@Aethelflaed knows my magical powers!

www.dogpile.com is a compilation of all search engines out there.

Maybe try turning off personalization on Google? I don’t know any other search engines to offer to you.

@TheInnocentOne all the search engines?

Funny that Google bought the domain duck.com and it redirects to google.

But duck isn’t the same as duckduckgo. They’re both completely different sites.

Whatever happened to that bit that went, “Don’t be evil?”

@HungryGuy: Peter Sagal on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me recently joked that “along with their new privacy policy, Google has changed their slogan from ‘Don’t Be Evil’ to ‘Mwah Haha hahahaaaa!’”.

I think the new slogan is: “Don’t be evil when you can be more than evil.”

Google isn’t willing to settle for being less than it can be.

Hi @lillycoyote ! Missed you.

@lillycoyote!!! I missed you too!!!

@lillycoyote Me three!

@janbb and @linguaphile and @ETpro… thank youl so much. I have missed you too!

You all are so wonderful!

:-)

@lillycoyote It is great to have you back around!