Google is the best option for everyone ?

There are lots of useful search engines out there, I would never recommend anyone to use just one search engine.

There are a lot of searches that google is not the best for. Lately with google, you get a lot of “search results removed due to DMCA” a thing that many other search engines wont do.

Google became so popular and widespread that no one thinks about using other search engines. It is default for popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome, and during daily life, no one needs to go past the first results page to find what they need so they just use what is in front of them.

Most of the times I have compared them recently, Bing outdoes Google a bit. The results are less noisy. I use both Bing and Google.

Google is simply the best search engine there is. No other engine is as powerful, and that’s why everyone uses it

List of Search Engines Kind of dated, from 2010 but interesting.

I’ve never felt the need to us any other search engine. Google keeps getting better and better.

I would love to find an alternative to Google. I sometimes do comparison searches with other search engines and Google always comes out on top.

I actually did the Bing It On Bing vs. Google Challenge, and I still picked Google. That’s a good enough reason as any to stick with what works.

I do better with Google than Bing.

I’m using Bing a lot now because Google has their greedy fingers on so much of the Internet and wonder of wonders, things they profit from dominate the first page or two of search results. If you’d have told me 2 years ago I’d be defending Micro$oft’s egalitarianism, I’d have been sure you were delusional, but here I am doing just that.

Because of the way Google tracks users (including non-logged-in users) it will give you different results according to what you have searched for in the past, and according to what links you clicked. You can test this by searching for the same terms from two different computers (ones that are widely-separated enough to have separate IP addresses).

A better search engine would either not do this, or do it in a way that is under the user’s control. DuckDuckGo, for example, offers “anonymous search” by default, so that it should yield identical results for everyone from the same search terms.
Another thing that DuckDuckGo claims is to truly support phrase searches. Google once upon a time would search for an exact phrase if the phrase was enclosed in quote marks. It still claims to do so, but in practice still matches on words in the phrase in addition to the full phrase. It also parses what you’ve written and gives results for what it thinks you meant. This makes it nearly useless for searching for technical information, which is at least half of my usage.
DuckDuckGo claims to support phrase searches without parsing, but I have established that it’s not always the case. I’ve contacted DuckDuckGo about this and they claim they are working on it. So, they are at least responsive to complaints, which Google famously is not.

I use DuckDuckGo frequently and it works well for me- for my purposes it’s basically a frontend for Google that removes anti-features. Another decent search engine to try is blekko. Their big deal is “spam-free search”. I don’t use them regularly, so I can’t really comment on how good the searches are.

If you want to, you can run your own search engine: YaCy is a program you can run on your computer which will hook up with other YaCy nodes and become part of a peer-to-peer distributed search network. You can also set it to crawl your own computer or your local network and provide results for them (to you, it doesn’t publish them to other nodes by default, thank goodness!) If you’re at all hackish, YaCy can be fun and useful. It’s a Java app, and quite memory hungry iirc. It caused a noticeable slowdown on my old dual-core Athlon64, so I stopped using it.