Ecosia can use either Google or Bing under the hood, and is working on its own search index along with Quant.
But, honestly, “it uses X under the hood” is such a reductive take. If you never give alternative search engines a try, they’ll never gain the userbase to actually build their own foundation.
Using Google (or Bing) itself means you’re contributing to the problem.
I guess I’d rather pay google too. But I’d even rather support a third party search engine, even if that means a small portion of whatever revenue I generate goes to either microsoft or google in the short to medium term.
For what it’s worth, it appears DDG is also working on their own index:
We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.
I don’t like how Startpage’s owner owns a bunch of legacy search engine URL’s (such as webcrawler and dogpile) and just serves the seemingly same engine on all of them.
(Also yes, WebCrawler used to be a search engine, before the practice of “crawling the web” came to apply to what all search engines do. Pretty neat history!)
DDG just uses Bing under the hood. Why do you prefer Microsoft over Google?
DDG lets you turn off the AI overview. That alone makes it miles better
Ecosia can use either Google or Bing under the hood, and is working on its own search index along with Quant.
But, honestly, “it uses X under the hood” is such a reductive take. If you never give alternative search engines a try, they’ll never gain the userbase to actually build their own foundation.
Using Google (or Bing) itself means you’re contributing to the problem.
You’re still contributing to the problem if whatever you use is literally paying Microsoft for every search you make.
You’d rather pay google?
I guess I’d rather pay google too. But I’d even rather support a third party search engine, even if that means a small portion of whatever revenue I generate goes to either microsoft or google in the short to medium term.
For what it’s worth, it appears DDG is also working on their own index:
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources
Because neither DDG nor Microsoft is tracking me when I use DDG.
About that …
https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blocking-limit/
That’s DDG’s browser, though, not the search engine (which is what we were talking about).
And clearly they can’t be trusted. How you gonna confirm that they don’t make similar carveouts with their website?
Do you have a better search engine?
Ecosia, SearXNG, Startpage*, Presearch
A good starting point to discover new search engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
*I have many doubts about startpage privacy, I didn’t bother search tho
I don’t like how Startpage’s owner owns a bunch of legacy search engine URL’s (such as webcrawler and dogpile) and just serves the seemingly same engine on all of them.
System1
(Also yes, WebCrawler used to be a search engine, before the practice of “crawling the web” came to apply to what all search engines do. Pretty neat history!)
Do you?
No, I don’t. That’s why I’m using DDG.
Have fun being tracked my Microsoft, then.
Because it’s not Google.
It’s also Microsoft.
True.