Everyone knows about Google search…so much so that it’s become a verb. Many know about some of the other search engines like DuckDuckGo.com and DogPile.com. But the search engine market is apparently not saturated because there are new ones entering all the time. One of my favorites is Neeva.com which promises not to track you, is free (including spaces which is kind of a persistent search) but offers additional features for a fee ($50/yr right now) but is perfectly serviceable on the free tier (and is my preferred search engine right now).
Another that I like to use occasionally is You.com. No ads like Neeva but You says they summarize the web based on your searches, providing answers from a limited list of sites they call your preferred sources, in different categories (e.g. web, news, shopping, etc). You can “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” sources but that’s about it. Still, its format and output can be useful.
A new one (to me) is AndiSearch.com – another that promises privacy It’s still in “alpha” status (which means they’re actively working on it and haven’t really finished the product) so it may break on occasion, They say they fight spam, won’t track you and won’t present you with ads. Its approach is a little different in that it’s conversational meaning that you interact with their “bot” and can type in queries as sentences. Sure, it has a command language so you can do things like “go facebook” and it’ll take you right to Facebook (although it’s beyond me why you would want to do that). The results are also presented differently from what I’m used to seeing – the bot takes up the left side of the window so the results are restricted to the right side of the window. You have some control over how the results are presented (mostly cosmetic) but overall I think it’s an interesting approach and one to keep an eye on. Do I use it much? Not right now but maybe, depending on how the product progresses…