Is anyone familiar with the search engine Swiss Cow? It’s supposed to be a privacy focused search engine that is also family friendly by filtering pornography. Just heard about it yesterday.
Google is not good when they are tracking you, and filter the results based on their political agenda.
2 Likes
While I agree, it has been my experience lately, that google isn’t providing search results based on what I am searching for. Lately, again, my experience, the first two pages of search results from google are more and more becoming links to vendors that sell something related to what I searched.
In some cases, google is providing me with search results that do not include any of the terms in my search ( zero ). So, I have to search google, then do a Ctlr-f to perform a second search.
At this point, I’ve stopped using google to search for anything. Too much bloat. DuckDuckGo is what I’m using now and over the last two years, I have seen definite improvements.
3 Likes
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a good bit now, and, not embarrasingly, have sort of forgotten about Googling! Haven’t had any issue with finding things I’ve searched for.
3 Likes
Swiss Cow looks interesting. The key is to follow the money trail to figure out how these services generate revenue. In this case it appears they rely solely on donations. Looks like it could be a solid choice especially for those with kids. DuckDuckGo is what I use most; with some Startpage thrown in when the results in DDG are not what I’m needing. I understand Startpage has been purchased by an advertising company so not sure if that’s going to ruin this service or not.
3 Likes
I still find myself using Google as a verb when talking about searching in DDG. 
1 Like
I hate to agree, but I agree.
DDG just doesn’t find what I’m looking for part of the time and I’m starting to see the same mass inclusion of marketing and sales links instead of what I was actually looking for. Although, I would be remiss if I did not mention that I have seen some improvements in DDG. For example, it wasn’t too long ago that you couldn’t limit your search to posts less than a year old or any time-frame less than a year.
They have in the past but they’ve become rather politicized in the last few years and it has affected the algorithms in search.
1 Like
Besides its privacy-focused nature, the killer feature of DDG, in my book, is bangs. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the DDG results, just prefix it with a !sp and see if StartPage is any better. Moreover, putting them right into my address bar is way more flexible and extensible than just adding more search providers to Firefox, and you can look through the available ones by searching “!bang” or going to this page. My only gripe is that this forum isn’t searchable with “!dln” yet. 
5 Likes