Are You Still Using Google?

[rgray222]

About a year and a half ago, I got rid of Google and loaded brave.com onto my desktop computer. It took less than 2-3 minutes to do, and I consider it a good decision. The bottom section of this post is loaded with links to some of the better and more interesting search engine sites around the world. For those who fear changing search engines, you can always keep Google on a separate icon on your computer and pop into it anytime you wish.

Please note: Some AI was used to put this info together.

I am wondering if others have moved away from Google, and I would be interested to hear what search engines you are using and why.

Most of us think of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, as a high-tech firm involved in a vast array of companies, such as autonomous vehicle technology, artificial intelligence, health and medical devices, smart home technology (Nest), data analytics, and advanced robotics, to name just a few. But the truth is, Alphabet, Google's parent company, holds 88.71% of the world's search engine activity, and they get 78% of their revenue through advertising. In 2024, Alphabet reported an annual net profit of $111.37 Billion. So many people work under the misapprehension that Google created the internet or that they are the internet. Make no mistake about it, Google is first and foremest and advertising company.

Google is extremely deceptive because its search results are designed to look organic, even though they are paid advertisements. These ads appear at the top of search results with a small “Ad” or “Sponsored” label, but the label is often easy to miss. Especially when you're in a hurry. The way the search results are delivered makes it is difficult to distinguish between genuine organic search results and paid advertisements. Occasionally, this leads you to click on scams, frequently on overpriced items, and malicious websites. Google explicitly states that no one can buy better PageRank or manipulate organic rankings through payment. While that statement is true, it applies to the organic rankings, not the paid-for sponsor rankings, which are the advertisements on top. The highest bidder gets top placement regardless of the quality, credibility or relevance of their site. This means that low-quality or even fraudulent businesses can outrank legitimate ones, which means Google is promoting unreliable and deceptive content. Google is constantly battling to remove malicious and fraudulent sites, but it is a never-ending battle. One could certainly argue that Google prioritises ad revenue over user safety, which means users can easily be misled.

Google states that in the near future, they will blend in paid-for ads with organic ads, which they state will benefit the public. I believe it will benefit Google and be difficult to distinguish between sponsored sites and organic sites. There has been a lot of discussion on the internet that Google is intentionally making it more difficult to search because they need people to make several searches simply for growth and revenue purposes.

I don't want to give people the impression that Google is a freeloader. They have done a ton of things to make the internet search better, and they offer really great free email, but they have reached a point of complete market saturation with 90% marketshare, so they need to cut corners to keep growing.

Here is an AI-generated list of things that Google has done to make internet searches better.

PageRank revolutionised search by ranking pages based on the quality and quantity of links, ensuring more authoritative results.
Universal Search integrated results from images, videos, and local listings into a single, cohesive experience.
Knowledge Graph enables instant answers by understanding real-world entities and their relationships, such as facts about celebrities or cities.
BERT and AI advancements improved natural language understanding, allowing Google to grasp context and intent behind complex queries.
Voice and visual search, including Google Lens and Multisearch, let users search by speaking or taking pictures, making discovery more intuitive.
Spam and low-quality content reduction through updates like the Helpful Content Update have significantly improved result reliability.
AI Overviews and generative AI now summarize information, answer questions directly, and even analyze video to troubleshoot issues.
Real-time features like flood warnings, Popular Times, and emergency hotline integration enhance safety and relevance.
Google Translate and multilingual AI models break down language barriers, making global information accessible.
Search Labs and ongoing experimentation with Gemini and Astra agents are redefining how users interact with search, moving toward proactive, intelligent assistance.

Google has the right to make a profit, and they may even have the legal right to be deceptive and to compromise your online safety, but they certainly don't have the right to our business. As of the end of In 2025, there are only 30 search engines in the world that are solely dedicated to general web searching. However, when you include niche search engines that cater to specific features and are unique to various countries, the number increases to over 1500 globally. So, are you willing to make a change? What search engine would best suit your specific needs?

Try some of the search engines out below.

It should be noted that two of the sites listed below are based solely on AI, Perplexity and Komo.

Startpage - Startpage uses privatized Google search results. The company makes a bold claim right above its main search box: "the world’s most private search engine." You get the choice of Web, Images, Videos, and News categories for searches. Startpage is headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands.

Swisscows - Switzerland-based Swisscows offers private email, private messaging, private storage, and a VPN, along with this privacy-focused search site that donates to worthy causes when you use it. Nefarious sites and adult content are excluded from Swisscows’ results, making it a suitable choice for younger users.

Tusk - With the belief in free speech and individual liberty for all, we are on a mission to protect a free and open internet, starting with TUSK, a secure web browser with an anti-censorship search engine, built-in news feed and now, the marketplaces’ first Conservative AI chatbot called Gippr. Tusk was launched from NYC, but its roots are in India.

Presearch - Privacy is the real mission of this decentralized Web3 search site. Presearch is the only service here that doesn’t run on a single company’s servers. Instead, it anonymizes your queries with distributed nodes, so a single provider doesn't save all your information. Presearch is located in Midland, Ontario, Canada.

Qwant - From the EU comes the anti-Google search service Qwant. It features an appealing design and utilizes first-party indexing robots to scan web pages for results, although it also currently leverages APIs from Bing, iTunes, Twitter, and YouTube. Qwant is based in Paris, France.

Yippy - Yippy classifies search results, and its well-organised results. In order to become the most conservative search engine, the company encourages free expression. You can browse search results by categories such as sources, sites, and subjects, which makes the search process easier. This company is developed from research from Carnegie Mellon Univ. and is based in Fort Myers, Florida, USA.

Mojeek - Mojeek is a UK-based search engine that focuses on privacy. Its index is completely built in-house, although it's considerably smaller than those of Bing or Google. The results are occasionally presented in an unexpected order, but you can usually find what you are looking for. One clever feature is Mojeek's search by emotions (if you add /emotions to its URL), which uses deep machine learning to analyze the feelings of a web page. Mojeel is a UK-based search engine.

Brave - claims “unmatched privacy.  Brave's feature lets you filter your results with parameters like No Celebrity content, News from the Left or Right. Brave has 1.5% of the worldwide market. Based in San Francisco, California, USA.

Perplexity - A an AI fast answering search engine based. This innovative search platform leverages large language models to deliver precise and context-aware responses to a wide range of questions. Built to handle both broad and detailed queries, Perplexity AI combines artificial intelligence with live search functionality to gather and summarize information from multiple sources. This new AI search engine is based in San Francisco, California, USA.

Yep - Yep lets you tip your favorite online content creators. The difference is that you can earn money for tips through searching. Yep devotes 90% of its search ad revenue to this purpose. YEP is a Singapore Company.

Gibiru - This search engine gives customers more power by letting them search without being influenced by large tech giants. Their motto, “Search. Don’t be Searched,” resonates with many customers. They do not track ip addresses. Based in Campbell, California, USA.

Sogou - Sogou is a multilingual search engine operated by Tencent in China. Sogou is the second-largest search engine in China.

Yahoo - The once-dominant and later-derided Yahoo Search has gotten its act together lately. The main Yahoo page has a search box at the top and panels for news, weather, sports, and trending searches, as well as a button for the company’s storied email service. Based in Sunnyvale, California, USA.

Seznam - is a web portal and search engine in the Czech Republic. Founded in 1996 by Ivo Lukačovič in Prague as the first web portal in the Czech Republic. Seznam started with a search engine and an internet version of the yellow pages. Today, Seznam runs almost 30 different web services and associated brands.

Baidu - The Chinese government has imposed an indefinite ban, widely referred to as the Great Firewall, on all Google services. Baidu has become the primary search engine for Chinese residents. This is China's way of forcing the country to create a large expansive internet service.

Yandex - Russia's most popular search engine, it is a Russian technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Yandex is specially designed for the Russian language. It understands complex Russian word changes very well. This Russian-based site holds 60%-65% of the Russian market. It is the clear number one. It is also the world's fifth-largest search engine. It gets over 50 million unique visitors every day.

DuckDuckGo - The biggest name in private search deserves your attention. DuckDuckGo (DDG) has a simple privacy policy: “We don’t collect or share any of your personal information.” The search interface is simple, too, and results are on target, though they lack the extensive info panels found in Bing and Google. DDG lets you search for images, videos, news, maps, and shopping results. DDG is based in Pennsylvania, USA.

Ask - Ask.com (known originally as Ask Jeeves) is an answer engine, e-magazine, and former web search engine, operated by Ask Media Group. The company is based in Berkeley, California, USA.

Ecosia - is a Berlin-based social business founded by Christian Kroll in 2009. It has a share of 0.10% . Its main purpose is to help finance tree planting and restoration projects. The more often you use Ecosia, the more trees you plant. This is a very good image maneuver to show a more friendly face of technology companies.

AOL - The famous old-time AOL is still in the top 10 search engines, with a market share of nearly 0.05%. AOL continues to operate as a web portal offering news, entertainment, and lifestyle content. AOL is based in NYC, USA.

Naver - Naver is a South Korean online platform that launched its own search engine in 1999. It was the first global operator to introduce comprehensive search features, such as aggregating search results from different categories and displaying them on a single page.

MetaGer - is a Germany-based search engine that is designed to keep your privacy safe by allowing you to search the internet anonymously. The proxy server will mask your IP address from the destination website and reduce the number of times the destination website can track your activity. In addition, MetaGer has partially open-source code and operates in compliance with German and European Union privacy laws.

InternetArchive - The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. The company is based in San Francisco, California.

Wiki.com is a dedicated search engine for wikis. You can select between all wikis, Wikipedia only, encyclopedias, or wikis submitted by other people. Wiki is a U.S. Company.

Bing - Owned by Microsft it is a search experience that rivals Google in terms of AI tools and the richness of information on the result page. Bing is it. It is another tech giant bing has 4% of the worldwide traffic. Bing is owned by Microsft based in Redmond, Washington, USA.

YaCy - entirely decentralized, peer-to-peer search engine. Users are responsible for creating and hosting the indexing of distributed search queries. With no single point of control for all searches, there is no tracking of search activity and no collection or retention of search history on the server side. YaCy is a German Company.

YouTube is the most popular video platform and the second most popular search engine globally. YouTube has more than 2.7 billion active users worldwide. The company hails from San Bruno, California, USA.

WolframAlpha - is different from all the other search engines. If you need something more scientific or related to mathematics and engineering, WolframAlpha can be a helpful solution. It is not described as a search engine, but some of our respondents mentioned that it is very useful as an alternative to Google for scientists. The company is in Illinois, USA.

Komo - has an accessible, uncluttered interface that makes searching with AI effortless. A drop-down menu under its central text field lets you decide which kinds of sources you want your answers based on, including academic research, blogs, general web search, news, social sentiment, and video content. You can use Komo for free, or you can sign up for a paid subscription. This AI company is located in San Francisco, USA.

Openverse - is a web search engine that allows users to find content they can reuse. All content in their Search index is under Creative Commons licenses. It is an open-source search engine for open content developed as part of the WordPress project in the U.S.

Dogpile - Dogpile is an English metasearch engine. Dogpile fetches results from Google, Yahoo, and Yandex.

Searx - One of the best parts about Searx is that it is completely ad-free. Searx employs encryption to protect your data. Searx is self-hosted software that is free and open-source. Searx’s patented search technique collects results from over 82 search engines. While it is hosted in Iceland and other countries it roots are in Germany.

[Casey Claar]

I have never used it ....nor ever spoken its name.

[meat suit]

I have used https://www.startpage.com/ for as long as I can remember..
I am only ever reminded of google existence when I mistakenly type into its search bar on my android phone and it promps me to sign in.
I am never signed into youtube either.

[norman]

Mike Adams has been developing his own family of services. I haven't used it much yet so I can't say if it's good or bad but I imagine it's pretty safe, for now.


https://brightanswers.ai


If you're looking for answers about health and science it's probably a worthy go-to.

There is even a downloadable (for local use on your own computer) A.I. engine called Enoch.



Knowledge Without Censorship
Now using 240,000+ indexed science papers, 50,000+ published books and millions of articles, transcripts and white papers to research your answers.

"We've trained BrightAnswers.ai on millions of articles on natural health and wellness, including thousands of hours of interview transcripts with health experts, millions of pages of content from holistic health websites, and hundreds of thousands of scientific papers on nutrition, herbal medicine and healing modalities."

— Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, founder of Brighteon

[Mike Gorman]

rgray222 Yes me too, I switched to the Brave browser & I use its search/AI - I must also declare that I also use a lot of the AI platforms for experimentation & media reasons, I do not accept everything I am told by them, but they can be very useful for an old IT engineer like myself, also my journalistic/writing pursuits - I am also an annoying general knowledge type (trivial pursuit anyone?) so I like to compare my store of wisdom gained from my book learning days with the claims of AI/search/online digitized information...thus I amuse myself.

[petra]

Posted by Mike Gorman (here)
rgray222 Yes me too, I switched to the Brave browser & I use its search/AI - I must also declare that I also use a lot of the AI platforms for experimentation & media reasons, I do not accept everything I am told by them, but they can be very useful for an old IT engineer like myself, also my journalistic/writing pursuits - I am also an annoying general knowledge type (trivial pursuit anyone?) so I like to compare my store of wisdom gained from my book learning days with the claims of AI/search/online digitized information...thus I amuse myself.

I use Brave too, it's a necessity for streaming tv shows on hdtodayz.to
So cool someone else likes trivial pursuit! I'm not very good at it but it's fun and no one ever wants to play with me haha
For searching most things I tend to use Grok.

[Le Chat]

Been on startpage for a few years and I've never had any issues. Although, for some reason, use duckduckgo on my tablet.

[Sunny]

I had an experience with search engines recently that shocked me. I had read an article on Morgellons disease and wanted to learn more. My search engine is Duck Duck Go, and I put in "morgellons". All the links I got were from the CDC, the Mayo Clinic and similar sites. I was not surprised, I expected it to be that way. So I went back to the article, which had links to two Morgellons sites. I copied the first link into the address line in Duck Duck Go. It gave me an error page. I thought, well maybe it is an old link. Then I put in the second link. It took me to a blank page.

That shocked me, because I suddenly realized I was being censored. I knew that the algorisms are biased. But I always thought if you put in an exact link, it would take you to the page. Having it refuse to show me something twice, I knew it was censorship. And not for politics, but for medical information!

That bothered me so much that I installed Yandex. I did a search for "morgellons". To my surprise, what came up first were websites written by people who have Morgellons! I had no idea people with Morgellons were sharing their own information.

So is Yandex my new search engine? No. I wanted it as a secondary search to use whenever I wanted. But they were too aggressive for me, like "Do you want Yandex to be your default?, "Do you want Yandex on your taskbar?, etc., etc. I didn't uninstall it, but I haven't used it again either.

[Mike Gorman]

I have had some positive interactions with grok, once it 'gets to know you' it can feel like a type of friendship, I was asking it to produce a short video with John Meillon telling off Albanese concerning his "hate speech" bill, John Meillon was a very Aussie actor with a classic Strine accent (he appeared in that Crocodile Dundee film) and I was very impressed with grok's overall grasp of the matter - as you know it is grok that is producing all of those "Amelia" videos that various Brits are publishing on X, really excellent stuff in terms of a push back on the enemy state.

[Mike Gorman]

Posted by Le Chat (here)
Been on startpage for a few years and I've never had any issues. Although, for some reason, use duckduckgo on my tablet.

duckduckgo I thought was a decent alternative, it claims to not store your searches or interfere - however I watched an interview with the founder/chief, I believe it was a one man project for a long time...all good right? He came across as being very woke, very virtuous, very progressive & this has since put me off. No offense intended towards fans of this, just a mention.

[kfm27917]

I am using Duck Duck go for most of my internet work

[petra]

I switched back to google because grok was overloaded and trying to make me pay for it
Google Gemini is good for searching too

[rgray222]

Posted by petra (here)
I switched back to Google because Grok was overloaded and trying to make me pay for it
Google Gemini is good for searching too

Petra, two of the links in my original post are AI-powered search and answer engines that deliver direct, well-sourced responses to user queries by combining real-time web search with advanced language models. (not my words, that is the AI hype)

You should give them a try. They are Perplexity and Komo. I believe Perlplexity is better and easier to use.
R

[petra]

Posted by rgray222 (here)

Posted by petra (here)
I switched back to Google because Grok was overloaded and trying to make me pay for it
Google Gemini is good for searching too

Petra, two of the links in my original post are AI-powered search and answer engines that deliver direct, well-sourced responses to user queries by combining real-time web search with advanced language models. (not my words, that is the AI hype)

You should give them a try. They are Perplexity and Komo. I believe Perlplexity is better and easier to use.
R

Thanks I noticed ThePythonicCow is using Perplexity too for coding stuff and it seems very slick so far
I downloaded the app ChatNow and so far so good!

[Mike Gorman]

Has anyone else taken a look at the Nano Banana AI image creator - it is actually insanely good & free/cheap it is part of the gemini Microsoft AI (boo hiss) - If you are interested with solo-preneur type work, there is a New Zealand lass who provides really top notch tuition on using these 'new resources' for making print on demand tee shirts/mugs - Sarah Chrisp is her name: I know there are a lot of such people on Utoob but Sarah is in fact very honest, genuine & also works with this technology, she is very worthwhile to listen to

https://www.youtube.com/@WholesaleTed
Have a look if interested

[Vicus]

Trust NO ONE...

My FIRST lesson/awakening about the computer/internet world was learning for the first time Windows 95.

It was 1996 and learning the Office packet, there was a special program ( I don't remember the exact name...Frontpage?) for make your own homepage, that was a hot theme at that time,everybody wanted his own
Internet page ( for blogs,for sale stuff,whatever...)

Learning how and where to place the various buttons came the YES/NO button, for whatever purpose...and from the teacher came the "tip" that you can cheat the NO button for a YES one!...

MEANING: from the beginning you learn that EVERYTHING ,include your own PC could be a trap! ( and now if you use Windows 11 ,AI is part of the OS (operative system), watching EVERYTHING you do, and
THEORETICAL you can use it/give permission ...to be active...or not,nice try...

EVERYTHING in internet asking you for permission or not about WHATEVER could be manipulate! without your concern !

After that awakening I was/am hyper vigilant ...

I try all variants coming to the mark, always testing everything, all marks/models/ updates,etc

NOT ONE is perfect (by the way) depend for what task...normal stuff, games,movies, politics,etc.

The BIG BAD example is how repulsive YOU TUBE has become, with adds everywhere,include in 1 song...

For the moment I use : Startpage,Qwant and Yandex.

[Le Chat]

Posted by Vicus (here)
The BIG BAD example is how repulsive YOU TUBE has become, with adds everywhere,include in 1 song...

There are many ways to avoid seeing ads....

[Vicus]

Addendum

How I go in internet:

Every day ,before I connect the internet, open the settings from Firefox , include in my O.S. Linux Mint and tune everything...
not as Admin but as visitor

security,NO history,and the new history and cookies delete when close the browser,no payments data , no pages names address,nothing!...

No pings to Firefox, no location,etc
And delete EVERYTHING when Firefox close.

When ALL this is done,then erst connect the internet and I go to Wikipedia and select which from the 3 internet searchers or 2 need for the moment ...

[Denise/Dizi]

I use Firefox browser with google search... It's my belief that nothing is secure, no matter what you are told, sold, or want to believe, there is always a backdoor somewhere... The intelligence agencies, and those who run them will tell you the same thing... Anything that you seek over the internet that leaves your device and returns to it, can and probably is being seen somewhere if someone wished to know what you're up to...