which search engine do you use ?

[bossa]

Hi all
Just wondering what is your preference? I have been using Google for ever and tried a couple of others ie yahoo, bing, (don't like the association with windoze) ask ,cuil etc.
After reading about google's privacy policy I felt uncomfortable so I have been looking around again.
Any views ?

[finifly]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

Depends on what I'm looking for. I use Firefox and right now have 22 different search engines for very different things. But when it comes down to good old searching, it's Google. I have been using it since it's inception. I haven't never really looked at their privacy stuff though, so I can't really comment on that.

[kevinc]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

I've also been using Google, probably because it was the default. Just looked on Firefox 3.5.3 on Kubuntu 9.10 and there are 545 possible search engine addons.

Two things I don't like about google, the repetition in search results and not so easy to filter out the pages I don't want and recently, clicking on one of the links it gave me a page that pretended to be something, then a pop-up with AVG antivirus, finding viruses in my 'windows' directories and urging me to click another link. Nice try, but I'm running Kubuntu 9.10 and clamav - not AVG and I don't have a windows file directory on this computer.

I'm trying altavista and it seems in a short time at least as good as google.

[Snowhog]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

Google. I've tried/used others, but I just like Google.

[bossa]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

Google. I've tried/used others, but I just like Google.

Yeah I have pretty much always used Google, but I started wondering if all is ok after I came across Scroogle
http://www.scroogle.org/ .Dunno kind of creeped me out a bit

[Telengard]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

Google is a great search engine, but I have grown to hate the idea that their cookies and scripts track my every move on the web.

For true privacy, there is http://www.ixquick.com. They log nothing, not even your IP address. They even allow secure connections, for the truly paranoid. There is no account to setup, only an optional cookie to retain your preferences.

[bossa]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

Google is a great search engine, but I have grown to hate the idea that their cookies and scripts track my every move on the web.

For true privacy, there is http://www.ixquick.com. They log nothing, not even your IP address. They even allow secure connections, for the truly paranoid. There is no account to setup, only an optional cookie to retain your preferences.

Hey Telengard
Yes I agree with you and have been using ixquick for the last couple of days and getting into it like the fact that is a metasearch engine, "meaning that it pulls results from many different search engines"

[MoonRise]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

Long ago I started out with Lycos. But for the past oh 7/8 years it has all been Google with the occasional Yahoo!

[bastard_lunatic]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

I used Yahoo til Google came around, and have used it ever since. I like the way they change their logo from time to time, sometimes it's pretty funny.

[Qqmike]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

Google.
And sometimes Wikipedia search
(set in Firefox search engine window)

[Ole Juul]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

Yes bossa, Google's privacy policy stinks! However, I must admit to using Google most of the time since they started and before that I used Altavista. Lately, I've been getting concerned about Google's behaviour and feel that where they are going is not healthy for society.

I don't like to be tracked so I started using different search engines just as a matter of principle and to spread it around a bit. I find that Yahoo gives pretty good results and Bing is useful too, although the fact that they give my name top ranking is a little suspect - though funny. Sometimes I use Scroogle specifically because I believe that search engines shouldn't track you.

Google has a lot of other shortcomings which may or may not be addressed by other engines. I haven't found a way to switch between .ca and .com. so when I'm on the phone to someone in the US we can't look at the same page simultaneously. Also, they don't distinguish between lower and upper case letters and that makes some searches very difficult and others almost (but not quite) impossible. Of course, the biggest problem they have is that they rate pages. How popular something is has generally no relevance in my world and using that as an underlying criteria often makes it so that I have to go many pages deep. Page ranking also prioritizes commercialism which is a serious downfall for research. It basically has the same effect as when we used to have to wade through the first two pages before we got to something that wasn't porn. I would probably pay money to have page ranking turned off. Yes, there are clever ways to search in order to find what you want, and I've gotten good at making it work for me. My point is that they don't always make it as easy as they could because their priorities are different than mine. Google and I are just not on the same page.

Thanks Telengard for the http://us2.ixquick.com/eng/ link. That's great! I might start using that quite a bit. One feature that it has is language choice right on the main page. Google is a bit clumsy in switching back and forth between languages.

[josefko]

Re: which search engine do you use ?

I have my own web pages with some informations about Kubuntu and from server statistics I see, that Google search engine and one local search engine are the only engines that come across. And the most visitors come with keywords from Google. So I like Google for it