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40oz

Alternate Search Engines

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I may be alone in this but I'm beginning to get kinda sick of Google. The way websites can buy their way to the top generally means if you search for anything, and unless you're patient enough to look a few pages ahead, you keep landing on the same 7 or 8 websites no matter what you search for. People almost always turn up facebook or twitter, objects, thories or other terms almost always turn up wikipedia, questions turn up yahoo answers, wikihow, etc.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when I search for terms I'd like to have results with a more microscopic turnup than to have terms that are caught in a blanket of general websites. I'd rather see opinions and perspectives from people (even highly biased people) than ad-ridden news sites and the same repeat sources.

It might just be what the internet has become now, but I feel like the internet is deeper than what google cares to admit. I've heard bing gets its results from google, and yahoo and ask.com are kinda garbage in my experience. Does anybody use any other search engines than google?

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As ArmouredBlood said, Duckduckgo is a cool alternative.

It also depends on how you search for things. For example, talking about something we are all familiar with: if you search for "community-chest" + Doom, the first result is from doomwiki.org. The second one is from doomwiki.org... but it's for Community Chest 4, probably not what you're looking for. Try using the Google "parameters": "community chest" site:doomwiki.org.

There are also some specialized search engines, like PicSearch if you're looking for photos, or Blinkx for videos.

EDIT: I'm pretty sure I wrote doomwiki.org, but whatever.
EDIT2: What the ...? Is the other Doom wiki forbidden here?

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Dragonsbrethren said:

Yep.


Mmmhh, I can't say I disagree, the wikia is shit, but that isn't necessary if you ask me.

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I wouldn't be surprised if it's banned here because of this issue, honestly; Wikia results tend to float up to the top when it comes to various subjects, which, when combined with how you apparently can't shut down a Wikia wiki when you're migrating your wiki off of it, causes it to completely overshadow the newer site. Seriously, Google doesn't like "doomwiki"; it'd rather break it up to "doom wiki" and throw the Wikia page at me instead, because, hey! It's a wiki for Doom, and Wikia's popular, right?

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Zed said:

There are also some specialized search engines, like PicSearch if you're looking for photos, or Blinkx for videos.


PicSearch auto-filters "offensive" images with no transparency or workaround. They can burn in hell for that.

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Things I've found help make Google search better are to delete cookies after every session so my searches aren't tailored by what I've searched before, and make ample usage of the minus operator to exclude particular websites (searching gaming videos on youtube becomes a beautiful thing with -pewdiepie, because most other "scream in your mic" LPers link to him in some way).

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Gez said:

startpage.com or ixquick (same company, different search engine).

and that one with the ducks, I guess.

Certainly good for anti-snooping, although they still utilise google's search results.

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Shadow Hog said:

I wouldn't be surprised if it's banned here because of this issue, honestly; Wikia results tend to float up to the top when it comes to various subjects, which, when combined with how you apparently can't shut down a Wikia wiki when you're migrating your wiki off of it, causes it to completely overshadow the newer site. Seriously, Google doesn't like "doomwiki"; it'd rather break it up to "doom wiki" and throw the Wikia page at me instead, because, hey! It's a wiki for Doom, and Wikia's popular, right?

Welcome to the New Age.

No matter what we do we cannot get our page to outrank wikia. They buy their top slot.

Also, since we left, wikia staff have taken over running the thing directly.

I have been carefully monitoring it off and on for any material being stolen from us without attribution. If I see it start happening, I will be getting a lawyer and issuing them a DMCA notice for every page that plagiarizes us.

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That site everyone is talking about is trying too hard to say GOOGLE SUX SO USE ME, ME, ME! Caring about privacy is nice but bashing your competitors to look good is not so nice, it is lame. And on their forums you can find numerous people complaining about duckduckgo plugins acting malware-like, trying to reinstall themselves over and over again. It doesn't sound very appealing.

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Memfis said:

That site everyone is talking about is trying too hard to say GOOGLE SUX SO USE ME, ME, ME! Caring about privacy is nice but bashing your competitors to look good is not so nice, it is lame. And on their forums you can find numerous people complaining about duckduckgo plugins acting malware-like, trying to reinstall themselves over and over again. It doesn't sound very appealing.


I like how their page about not being tracked asks you to turn on javascript to read it. And when you activate javascript you see said page is mostly text and links.

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Phml said:

I like how their page about not being tracked asks you to turn on javascript to read it. And when you activate javascript you see said page is mostly text and links.

Gotta leave a cookie on your system.

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Aliotroph? said:

PicSearch auto-filters "offensive" images with no transparency or workaround. They can burn in hell for that.


Yeah, but to be fair, there are also specialized search engines for pornography or snuff, for example.

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How do I know what kind of rules they apply to "offensive?" It's probably close to what most conservative corporate types use, which means it will block all kinds of things. Given the way most companies in America seem to work, it'll probably start blocking Darwin fish images too.

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I'm kinda late to the topic, but I don't think I've seen anyone mention DuckDuckGo? It's pretty neat, and you guys should check it out. I should mention that they have like no affiliation to Youtube or Google+ accounts.

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BloodyAcid said:

I'm kinda late to the topic, but I don't think I've seen anyone mention DuckDuckGo?

BloodyAcid should have said:

I'm kinda late to the topic, but I didn't read any of the replies

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Quasar said:

No matter what we do we cannot get our page to outrank wikia. They buy their top slot.


Have you asked the owners of the Nethack Wiki how they successfully migrated off Wikia? Their community wiki consistently comes up higher in search rankings than the old wikia site. It's not impossible.

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