Best Search Engines Going Forward

DuckDuckGo

• DuckDuckGo is simple to explain: they're a search aggregator which skims results from other search engines and molds it to its own purpose.
• The difference is that it serves up these results without tracking the user or recording the users' data.

• Not only does respecting the users' privacy avoid having their personal browsing data compromised by third parties, but getting out of the filter bubble of personalized search results means you see a complete picture of the web, not just the part that a corporation wants you to see.

  

Yandex

• Not many in the western hemisphere are familiar with Yandex, and yet it's been in business since 1997.
• One of the top ten biggest search engines, https://yandex.com/ is unfiltered and fast, serving up results that seem to be mysteriously missing from other mainstream search engines.
• Like any developed web technology company, they offer a side of features and services, along with far fewer ads.

  

Hot.com

• https://hot.com is an example of a niche search engine. It finds adult results only.
• No matter what you search for, it only crawls those websites, social networks, dating sites, and so on.
• It does this without tracking your data or keeping you in a filter bubble either. While its subject matter is certainly a commonly-expressed use of the web, it also suggests a broader possibility in developing other special-interest search engines with a similar method.

  

HotBot

• HotBot is an example of a mature technology which never went away after it got shoved to the side by the market heavyweight.
• Associated with "Web 1.0" technology like DMOZ and Inktomi, HotBot today is a search engine focused on user safety.

• Working both in the fields of user data privacy and web-surfing safety, their focus is to protect users from being attacked by malware and spam, as well as being bought and sold in ad targeting schemes.

  

Million Short

• Time for a search engine with a fun gimmick: https://millionshort.com/ is just like any regular search, but it allows you to clip off a set number of websites from the "top" or "bottom."
• Filtering out the top (100 - 1 million) most popular websites from results lets you skip right to the "deep web," to discover smaller sites without so much corporate influence, minority opinions, niche connections, and general knowledge discovery.
• There are many more great examples like these, but there are here to demonstrate the amazing variety we could be having in search.
• There's a lot more you can do with a query than just run a mono-culture algorithm on it.