There are a lot of different search engines one can use today.
Unfortunately, very few of them are actually “search” engines anymore. Rather they are “find” engines.
By this, I mean they are not geared toward you wanting to search for something, it is geared to help you find product.
It has gone far beyond being a tool to search out data and information into that bastion of modern greed: another damned marketing tool.
Some search engines offer you that very tool: “privacy”, by promising to never save your personal or search information. Unfortunately, their engines work along the line of the algorithms used by the other monolithic marketing controls established by the galactic overlords.
Google controls the search market and has a feature that used to be very interesting, the “random” search. Today, it is nothing more than a search for what veryone else is searching for in the past few minutes. In other words, another marketing tool.
Yahoo!, who began by being a new and upcoming search engine before it was anything else, no longer uses its own search engine. No, it gives you Bing instead. Yeah, right. Like, that’s any better than anything else?
It used to be that search engines were used to locate data. If the results gave too much of one sort, the user could ad “- [that item]” and it would re-search but exclude those types of entries. Nowadays, it does no such thing. Why would advertisers pay you money if you allowed the consumers to remove you from the search. How dare they, huh?
Recently, I wanted an image of a nightstand in a darkened bedroom. I have seen several in the past year or two and searched “image of pocket change on nightstand in darkened room”. I immediately got two hundred images of nightstands for sale from Bed Bath and Beyond, Ikea, and the like. After careful examination, not a single one showed any sign of pocket change nor were any of them shown without the bright light one requires when trying to sell their products.
Another search “image of watch on shadowed nightstand” produced only a hundred photos of the brightly lit nightstands… the other hundred were… you guessed it: watches for sale.
Search engines are fairly useless when searching for things other than images as well.
A research search for medical studies related to asthma resulted in a variety of articles and wikipedia pages. After looking at the various articles and their blurbs – not what I was looking for – I clicked to go to the second page and saw… the exact same articles referenced along with the wikipedia pages.
The third page? Same stuff. The articles actually began changing on page eight for no apparent reason.
And this was on top of the fact that the search engine told me there was a total of 1,235,721 articles found. Then why couldn’t they show me a few more of those other articles?
Another thing, it used to be that the ads at the top of the page were marked off by a horizontal line, separating the ads from the actual searched for links. There were three or four ads and ten separate links.
Today it is completely different: ten ads and only five actual articles and there is, of course, no indicator where the ads end and the searched-for stuff begins.
No, search engines today are nothing more than marketing tools for commercial enterprises.
And thinking of them for anything else is a joke.
How else do you think Google came to be worth billions?
Certainly not for their social consciousness!
Oh, and I tried to find some other search engine but…
For What It's Worth 