Search engines: Time to take a stand
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Wonderful and informative article. I have DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. It was both easy and tough to give up Google. My issue with Google is they thrive on user metadata and are not Vivaldi partners. The easy part was ticking a couple of boxes in the settings. DuckDuckGo is a V partner and using DDG helps support the Vivaldi Team. Last time I checked they like to eat once in a while. Anytime I can show my support and loyalty to Vivaldi I will do so.
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For default I use Startpage, but sometimes I switch to Search Encrypt and Gibiru
Swisscows also a nice private search enine, with AI and semantic search -
Now I have a battle within myself to figure out what to do. I've been using Ecosia for a long time, so I can do my part in planting trees. But a previous post says Ecosia uses the Bing engine. Not a fan of that, so I guess I'll leave the tree planting up to someone else.
Qwant seems like a good idea, except apparently its results aren't quite as good.
DuckDuckGo... with its privacy and non-biased philosophy; plus they're a V partner, which helps the V team keep things alive... I like that idea. A lot. So typing all this out has helped me see the answer. I'm glad I could help myself. LOL
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I tend to use most of the provided search engines at various times.
For important work/research I use Bing. It provides me with the most relevant results.
I use Ecosia somewhat but living in Canada not all results are relevant to my search topic.
My favourite is Startpage as it uses the google search syntax with which I have become familiar. Yes, I have found the same syntax in other engines give zero or odd results.
I also much like DDG, Qwant, and even Startpage's partner Ixquick although that one does not use google and I may have to rephrase my search.
Priority is the ability to do my searches using POST. Not all engines support it.
Next is the ability to customize the results by geographic location and to have some control over where my searches go through (as Ixquick/Startpage do: closest / fastest, EU servers or US servers)
There are others too many to mention so I stick to those though I am not opposed to suggestions of new engines and am always happy to to find good alternatives to the mainstream search engines.
Never do I use google anymore. Too many results and many/most irrelevant as it sucks up my personal info. -
@greybeard I used to use startpage a lot, but duckduckgo won me over a few years back. Nowadays I only go back to startpage when I want to restrict the search to one year. Both engines let you restrict by day/week/month but by year can be very useful for rather uncommon searches, which would show no relevant results for month. I wished duckduckgo would introduce this too.
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Looking at the title, I thought you had enabled the POST search option like in old Opera (an extra text box to include the POST data).
But as I can see there is no news
Will it soon be available? -
@izk666 Take a look in Settings, Search. The POST option is already available.
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@pesala There are two problems:
- Not all engines support POST (trivial, if they don't support it you are out of luck)
- Vivaldi does not show "Add as search engine" when right clicking into the search field of most exclusively POST capable engines.
The latter can be overcome with a bookmarklet:
https://quhno.vivaldi.net/2017/10/20/how-to-add-search-engines-that-use-post-to-vivaldi/ -
I've just spent a few minutes searching (in DDG), but can't find out what searching with POST means. Can someone explain it? What is the advantage?
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@joelyoung I think you can get the answer by reading what's in the link provided in Pesala's answer.
Some search engines allow users to use the POST method for search. This method ensures that websites won’t know the search terms you use to find their site and the search isn’t logged on web servers or stored in History. If you have enabled “Use POST method”, but search doesn’t come up with any results, this means that the search engine of your choice doesn’t support the POST method. If you still want to use this search engine, you should disable “Use POST method”.
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if it is so important, why don't show the icon of selected searh engine in the search field? it would make the choice more evident.
this feature was requested almost a year ago, and has not added yet. is it so difficult to implement?
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/25249/show-selected-search-engine-icon-in-the-search-field -
@vladimyr Personally I don't want an ugly site icon permanently in my UI – should be optional.
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@vladimyr The icons should be displayed in the Search with menu too.
As with the bookmarks, there should be an option to show the icon and/or text, or both.
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I use normal google but I go try Qwant for a while.
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This is definitely a discussion I intend to follow - I have a feeling it may run for some time! My own problem is that whenever I try a different search engine instead of Google I get fewer, and less useful, hits, though this is usually when I'm looking for examples of a term or expression in use 'in the wild' in order to determine if a translation (of a term or expression) that I've come up with is a term or expression actually used by real people writing in the UK. (Fascinating to know the French for search engine is moteur de recherche; perfectly logical, though, and sometimes one rather envies the French with their almost divine Académie. By and large, though, I still favour natural selection!) Having said all that, I'll now try using other search engines. I do already use Ecosia sometimes.
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I alternate between DuckDuckGo, Qwant and Ecosia. I tend to use DuckDuckGo the most because I like their UI and dark mode, and I find the programming Instant Answers really useful. I've found Qwant to be particularly good if I'm looking for something in French or German, which is not very often, but once, when I was researching someone in Germany, Qwant found something crucial that no other search engine had. I like the fact that Ecosia plants trees so I use it sometimes too, but I don't like it as much as a search engine.
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@luetage That's almost the only reason I ever use Google (and based on this, I'll switch to startpage.) When looking up software issues, I often get solutions that are way too old to be useful and restricting the results to the last year really helps.
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@greybeard One search engine that gets virtually no press is SymbolHound. It allows search terms containing syntactical tokens like braces. Since a lot of Vivaldi users know how to program, they might find it useful.
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@lakeinholland Another great French word is the one for "computer". It's ordinateur which conveys the sense of putting things in order which I like a lot better than something that's just a number cruncher.
