I somewhat impulsively picked a new search engine last night after reading about how Google deliberately worsened their search results to cause repeat searching thereby increasing total searches and thereby ad revenue.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
In the past I have used Ecosia and Bing for a few months after getting frustrated with the SEO slop Google was feeding me, but ultimately switched back to Google for reasons I can't even remember. I do not care about privacy in searching. If anything, I actually enjoy the targeted ads I get from being tracked.
Last night I switched to Qwant after 5 minutes of reading about my options, and liking the results in a few test searches. Prior to last night, I never even heard of Qwant.
I will not bet on this market. I will collect the 100 bonus Mana for creating this market.
1,000
3.00I switched to perplexity as my default search engine on anything that gives me the option and Yandex where I couldn't choose perplexity. Perplexity is better then I was expecting. I don't even know what Yandex is yet.
I did like Qwant but it is blocked by my job's wifi, and constantly made me do captcha, and as a last straw seemed to be adding more AI slop to it's results in the past few weeks.
@WilliamGunn Perplexity was a good suggestion, thanks! I wish Chrome an android would let me make it my default search engine.
@WrongoPhD That's a feature request of mine, too. Firefox has an assistant sidebar thing that's kinda helpful.
@AlexanderTheGreater despite how frivolously I spend mana, I would not spend actual money on a search engine. I also would not try anything that I have tried in the past and did not like, which includes DuckDuckGo in addition to the others I mentioned. I might try another one if Qwant fails me, but only if I could find something free that I haven't tried before and seems reasonable.