which search machines are good.

[thehipho]

Lots of new search providers claim no tracking. Like Ecosia, and donates profits to reforestation.

[DuckHook]

Google dwarfs all others in their crawling and indexing. It's not really even a close contest.

that is true. but it also often gives wrong results or filters results in a wrong way. so the first hits are not necessarily the correct ones. and the first results are often "sponsored" and can be wrong for that reason.

so "install java on ubuntu" might bring up the old website with non functioning PPA in first few hits. it should sort results based on time. i also find out when i search for errors i get very old and irrelevant results on the top. they could be misleading to users for example.

Both statements are true.

I've had very decent results with DuckDuckGo, but occasionally resort to Google if DDG returns limited hits. My own purely anecdotal comparison: DDG tends to return fewer links, but this is often a blessing because they are more relevant and easier to parse. Google returns more hits but, as mastablasta notes, they are often of low quality, obsolete, misleading or—most damningly—skewed to Google's agenda. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the skew were obvious, but they are often very subtle and hard to detect.

My newest gripe is that many hits, especially those dealing with HW searches or hard goods, are dominated by Amazon results to the point that it's almost a form of spam. I suppose that's just the reality of life today with the 800 lb gorilla, but it is still super irritating and diminishes the usefulness of web searches in general.

[wolftrax]

thank you. I just found it,.. I also try out other browsers.