Writers tend to research a myriad of topics for their manuscripts, whereas travelers like to research options for planned trips. Today, the tool most people use for finding information is Google. It has become a standard, although we now know Google sells our search information and other data to marketers. Fortunately, a recent test of search engines discovered a software that produces better results than Google, and doesn’t trade our data.
The search engine is called Searx.
LibreTechTips conducted a test of 11 search engines that are available on the internet. The purpose of the test was to compare their capabilities to deliver useful results. This means beating Google, which is the recognized leader in search.
Some of the tested services, like Bing and DuckDuckGo are familiar to most people, whereas names like Mojeek or Metager may not be widely recognized yet.
The way the search engines were ranked in the test was simple. Multiple types of searches were entered into the search engines, and the returned results were evaluated.
As expected, Google was a top performer, but not the best. Searx, an open source, privacy-respecting search engine was even better than Google Search. The trick is that Searx doesn’t maintain its own index, but utilizes results Google and other search engines generate.
These two best search engines were far better than others:
- Searx
- Google Search
The second category of search services did quite well, although the gap to the leading duo was quite wide:
- 3. Bing
- 4. DuckDuckGo
- 5. Startpage
- 6. Swisscows
The rest of the search engines missed many results:
- 7. Mojeek
- 8. Ecosia
- 9. Qwant
- 10. Yandex
- 11. metaGer
Detailed descriptions of the test results and conclusions are available at LibreTechTips.
Searx has taken a different approach to search. It doesn’t collect an index of links from the internet, but it is a software algorithm that ranks the results it receives.
It is open source code that anyone can download, and run on their own servers. From privacy perspective, that’s a good deal. Naturally, the vast majority of people access public Searx engines that organizations, enterprises and individuals are already running and making publicly available. You decide which Searx instance you access.