I live in a country which uses a language I don’t speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).
Ecosia. It’s not a great search engine, but it’s good enough most of the time, and it plants trees.
It doesn’t necessarily return the results I want, though. Possibly because it isn’t tailored to me like Google is (thanks, data-scraping!) so sometimes I use Google if I want a search engine to use context.
For example, I couldn’t remember the name of the show ‘Voltron’. If I search Ecosia for ‘cartoon show giant robots made of smaller robots’ then I get pictures, or snippets of the phrase ‘giant robot’ or ‘show giant’ or whatever, literally looking for it. But then I swap to Google and it uses context to show me Voltron stuff among the results so I can be like YEAH THAT’S IT NOW I can make my extremely topical joke to my friend, thanks
I hear good thinks about Duck Duck Go, it may even use Google’s search indexing but it protects your privacy and doesn’t track what you’re searching. Which is both ‘bad’ (your results are harder to narrow down obscure searches) and good (general searches aren’t contaminated by obscure guesses).
DDG actually uses Bing’s search indexing last time I checked! Startpage uses Google’s, which the major difference between them. Brave does its own thing, I think.
Ecosia! 🌳
Did you know about shortcuts?
Usually, I start searching on ecosia. If I’m searching for images, I append #i to my search to make it an image search. If I find no good results, I append #g to my search and it switches to google and performs the same search there.
I did not! That’s fantastic information, thank you!