On the other hand, search isn't the only important thing - presumably that is why Google doesn't seem to focus there. Bing has seemingly given up on some of the big things, like Maps, and failed to promote others (like Translator) in ways that really compromise the core offering.
Bing Maps used to have a very legitimate edge over Google; then they stood still for years and I'm not sure they could ever catch up.
To make matters worse, Bing has lost lots of cool, useful features; features that I could show someone and then expect them to legitimately consider Bing. For example, searching for a song used to let you immediately read the lyrics without ads, listen to the song through Zune or buy the song through various providers. Wolfram Alpha used to be directly integrated into the search engine; it was extremely powerful and convenient.
I really would have liked to see a Bing that didn't take as many steps back as it took forward; that Bing could be a real contender.
As far as I'm aware Bing (along with Facebook and Yahoo!) are backing https://wego.here.com/ these days. I'm curious to see where that goes...
Two things become obvious at that point, and the main one is that other search engines don't just customize search results to individuals, they actually spend costly human resources currating and QA'ing results. DuckDuckGo's search results kind of suck, and the reason they're not as good is because the results are not groomed to the same degree, by as many eyes, nor to the same level of quality.
The other obvious thing quickly noticed is that DuckDuckGo's !bang operators are so, so, so much more handy than some of the other horrendously mangled, inscrutable query strings you wind up landing on, that would require 5 or 10 clicks, navigating the intended user interfaces of the parent sites that actually host the results.
Compare using !googleimages on DuckDuckGo, to what actually happens when you click and type for results at https://images.google.com?
It's kind of silly that you can't just pass a query string to Google, and that DuckDuckGo does their query strings better than Google does for it's own product.
Do you mind elaborating on this a bit? I've been using DDG for a couple of years now and, although at the beginning I would fallback to Google very often, now that changed. I still fallback to Google from time to time, but it's more to have a confirmation that, as parent says, the results are disappointing than anything else. Now I probably use Google after trying g DDG once in every 10/15 queries. It used to be one in three when I switched.
To be honest, I even find DDG to be way way better than Google in certain results. Programming related queries that would produce StackOverflow results are one example. And I'm not even considering the preview feature that DDG has that shows you the accepted answer to the SO question right in the search page.
One thing I don't like though, is the way the images and videos preview works (not in the image tab, in the search tab) on DDG. I find that row of videos/images to just be annoying since I would explicitly make an image search if that's what I needed.
That said, my experience now is that if DDG results are disappointing, there's a very very high chance that Google results will be disappointing too.
Also, it's a bad design decision to make bangs belong to search engines. In the past the firefox extension lookpick[1] solved that problem very well: They crowdsourced search engnines, had their own search box in the right corner of the screen, and to make it easy to pick the right search engines, search engines used searchable tags.
On top of that, if you add easy help for search operators for each site(also crowd sourced), would be really useful.
I wish there was something like that for chrome.
[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lookpick-sear...
Hardly comforting.
Nice 'hook' as well. From their About Us page: 'Ecosia is a social business run by a small group of dedicated people. We work together to create tools that empower everyone to easily do good by planting trees. We believe our trees have the power to make this world a better place for everyone in it.'
[0]: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ [1]: https://searx.laquadrature.net/
This allows you to search other engines, but still have theirs as default
All the engines mentioned can be searched via it. !b !bing !s !startpage !vimeo !giphy etc.....
Only issue I have with it at the moment is that it tends to look for articles in my native language instead of in English but you can probably configure that somewhere and I just have not looked yet. It falls back to English anyway when it can not find one in Dutch.
EDIT: For people on here, !hackernews might be useful :-)
[0] - http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-really-cool-things-you-can-do...
But hey, everything is "fine" as longs as the Web keeps a bunch of developers employed with six-digit salaries. They will put up with any amount of accidental complexity and ignore any effects on future innovation as long as their jobs are secure. (And those jobs are more secure than ever because you need ever increasing number of specialized professionals to keep the increasingly complex technology stacks operational.)
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* One exception I know of: Web Archive. But their coverage is pretty spotty and they aren't strictly speaking a search engine. Still, it's an awesome effort. At lease someone tries to swim against the tide.
It uses money generated from ads seen in search results to plan tree. Nice idea, not sure if the underlying implementation is Google.
http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/13/
They really started growing again since August last year.
I've explored this in personal projects- a search engine for lectures (https://www.findlectures.com) and stock photos (https://stickstock.com).
It ceases to be considered "vertical search" and becomes a category in its own right if you do it well enough, even though the way you interact with many of these apps is that you type in free-form text into a search box and it performs some fuzzy matching.
DDG "gave" me unknown family bible location recently (in La)
What about millionshort?
it's a bit better with currency exchange 5USD to EUR
However, the real reason your wish will not be granted is that those 2-3 websites are absoluely opposed to such a scenario, as people will not visit their websites anymore. If I remember it correctly, Google had that feature years ago and was sued by Yelp(?) because they basically stole all their traffic.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=arrival
unless there will be another engine which will provide me with same information as you can see on right side of screen I am not even bothering to try it, it's such basic feature that I think every engine should provide it
Google has this feature, so I am not sure why they can and others can't.
