Google pisses me off. Any other search engine I should try?

[MultiForce]

have you thought about creating a homepage located on your harddrive? like a intranet homepage?

To use for what?

[Frankthetank1]

yeah i guess even if your homepage is located on your hard drive you'd still have to use Google as your search engine on it. I am sure there are ways to stop Google from tracking you and remove ad's though

[MultiForce]

yeah i guess even if your homepage is located on your hard drive you'd still have to use Google as your search engine on it. I am sure there are ways to stop Google from tracking you and remove ad's though

Ah.. I don't really care about that tracking stuff. But they might as well give me good search results if they want to keep an eye on me anyway

[anon]

have you thought about creating a homepage located on your harddrive? like a intranet homepage?

Or a bookmark list.

About the tracking stuff, Scroogle was simply excellent to remove it, and that's why I used it so often... sadly, they shut down for good some days ago. Now I'm using pagewash.com, which someone recommended me as an alternative, with the option to remove all cookies and ads. You can also host a Glype script in some free hoster, and as long as you don't use it excessively, they won't notice.

[zot]

Like many others here and elsewhere, I hate the direction that Google has gone. I now need to put *extra* quotes around every single search term. I also can't stand the way that Google's results are actually **hidden** redirect-links (going back to Google.com) that allow Google to monitor not just what people search for, but the sites that people actually visit.

I would like to find a browser that automatically strips out Google's fake re-direct links and gives the actual URL in its place. (basically doing the same as I can do manually: deleting the "http://www.google.com/url?q=http" from the left side of the address, as well as everything to the right of "&sa="

try: https://startpage.com/

That's the version of ixquick they made for the US.

I think there are no differences short of the name.

I used to think the same thing, until I noticed that the search results were different. Startpage seems to have results more similar to Google than IXquick does.

This may not be the case with everyone. One of the recent trends I hate is that a lot of sites present different pages --and search engines return different results-- to people in different countries (based on IP address) and often it seems the only way to change this "setting" is to use a proxy in another country. (just another one of my many gripes ... in many ways it sometimes seems that things in the internet world were much better 10 years ago)

[anon]

I would like to find a browser that automatically strips out Google's fake re-direct links and gives the actual URL in its place. (basically doing the same as I can do manually: deleting the "http://www.google.com/url?q=http" from the left side of the address, as well as everything to the right of "&sa="

Firefox with the Google Privacy addon. Since this involves a simple string search and replace operation, I'm sure there are user scripts for the task as well. But the addon is better because it works on any site with these Google's (and other engines') redirects, including those which use customized search.

I used to think the same thing, until I noticed that the search results were different. Startpage seems to have results more similar to Google than IXquick does.

That's correct. I was wrong when I wrote that post and thought it was the only difference. ixquick gathers results from many search engines, but Startpage only gives you Google's, just like Scroogle used to. So they're what I'm using now. Good matches with encryption, no cookies and no IP logs is awesome.

This may not be the case with everyone. One of the recent trends I hate is that a lot of sites present different pages --and search engines return different results-- to people in different countries (based on IP address) and often it seems the only way to change this "setting" is to use a proxy in another country.

It gets worse.

[mjmacky]

ixquick gathers results from many search engines

Metacrawler has returned? Has anyone ever had to submit a site to a search engine before the Google days? What a pain in the ass that whole process was.

[wiseman002]

Unless I want to use " all the way to the moon I have to find another search engine. They just drop the words not giving results and when I write LOGGING I want to find information about LOGGING not LOG etc.
I really miss the old Google that didn't even fix my stupid spelling mistakes.

I find Bing a bit better (never thought I would say that) but is there other sites I should try?

Try Verbatim feature. "With the Verbatim tool, you can search using the exact keywords you typed," explains Google. Verbatim disables Google's spelling corrections and Google no longer replaces some of your keywords with synonyms (e.g.: television / TV), similar terms (e.g: buy flowers / send flowers), words with the same stem (e.g.: fixing / fix). Verbatim also disables search personalization.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com.br/...-verbatim.html

[zot]

Thanks for the suggestions. (I'll check the links after I log out [and can access them])

The issue I have with Firefox's Google-Privacy addon is that it requires Firefox 6 or higher, which I tried and left when I discovered that the "view/page source" command (a must-have feature for me) had been stripped out. Maybe by now it's been put back in - I don't know, as I stopped upgrading after that.

I wondered why google had to change "Verbatim" from opt-out to opt-in. My other complaint about the way Google and Bing are set up is with a backpage of semi-permanent personal settings, rather than being easy to change any setting on the fly, as search engines originally were set up. Also, the heavy dose of JavaScript --which many basic, legacy functions now require-- mandates a fairly powerful computer.

[anon]

The issue I have with Firefox's Google-Privacy addon is that it requires Firefox 6 or higher, which I tried and left when I discovered that the "view/page source" command (a must-have feature for me) had been stripped out. Maybe by now it's been put back in - I don't know, as I stopped upgrading after that.

It's there as of Firefox 11, and has its own shortcut.