Comment by WarOnPrivacy
2 years ago
> Realistically, there are only 2 search engines now.
From the article:
Many alternatives to GBY [Google, Bing, and Yandex] exist, but almost none of them have their own results;
This seems to assert that ~0 other search providers do any crawling at all. Ever. Are we sure that's the case?
(they could crawl but never ever return those results == more odd).
It's a very long article so understandable that you did not read on and learn about other search engines crawling beyond GBY. Still there are indeed very few that are crawling at web scale, and internationally. We are at 8 billion pages and totally independent [0], hence expressing our concerns to 404 media after being blanked by Reddit.
[0] https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek
> did not read on and learn about other search engines crawling beyond GBY. Still there are indeed very few that are crawling at web scale, and internationally
That's helpful clarification.
In criticism of the article, you might agree that
none of them have their own results
is a fairly absolute statement. It signals: Final word on the matter; no nuance to follow.
Omitting the "almost" from "almost none" makes it sound disingenuously more absolute than it actually is.
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I mean, I didn't read on because it's paid.
I'm not taking their reporting without compensation, but that also means I didn't have the whole story. Such is life in this era of the internet.
I believe Brave Search is also starting their own index. There are some tiny independent indexes too:
https://www.crawlson.com/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://wiby.me/ https://searchmysite.net/
Bing provides far fewer verbatim results for pretty much all search queries that I've tested.
And Yandex isn't much better for non cyrillic search, Baidu is only for the Chinese web effectively.
And all other search engines either don't even attempt to do full web crawls anymore and/or buy from one of the four above.
So realistically there's just one search engine for the full web that actually does the work.
Brave has their own search engine, yandex I only use for reverse image search, baidu's interface is really clean and feels like old school google... but I don't speak chinese so I can't use it.
I hope that one day they get a western version
Brave doesn't have its own index of the full web, and it's even less useful than Yandex. And very likely buys some of it, according to what I've heard. So it falls into the last category.
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> And Yandex isn't much better for non cyrillic search,
I like Yandex when I'm rabbit-holing after obscure musicians/music. I routinely have a better experience than I do with DDG or Kagi or Goog.
Kagi also uses Yandex index so it would be unusual that something exists in Yandex and not in Kagi results.
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It's also vastly better for finding livejournal blogs.
I believe Kagi has its own crawler as well and it merges all the results and does whatever Kagi does behind the scenes to show the mix
Aside: Does anyone know how the GBY term became a thing and why it includes Yandex but not Baidu?