New from independent search-engine Mojeek, The Search Engine Map. All the general search engines at 2019, and where they get their results from. Very useful.
Some of my observations, on spending an hour with the map and doing some tests:
* I see that Yippy is Bing, only with what is claimed to be a boost given to small and useful and hobbyist sites. And/or a slight suppression of the megasites. Well, it certainly improves Bing, from what I’ve seen of it so far (a week’s testing) looking for answers to techie queries in forums. Either that or Bing Search has improved since I last tested it. Even so the main problem is simply Bing’s lack of reach, when compared to the size and scope of Google. Key sites which Google puts as the No. 1 result are not even indexed in Bing.
* Chinese search-engine Baidu is missing from the map, although it is mentioned in the page. It is sort-of possible to search Baidu In English, but according to a 2011 Reuters report it’s just Bing, perhaps with (by now) some extra Chinese-language site indexing. I can’t find any announcement that Bing is no longer their main search supplier in 2019.
* Interesting to see that Jive is a Yandex clone, but with privacy apparently baked in. It’s new to me. Jive’s privacy aspect might make it useful if you’re paranoid about Putin. It’s also slightly faster than Yandex, and is uncensored like Yandex. The latter point is evidently not the case with DuckDuckGo, even though the Duck draws results partially from Yandex. (Update: May 2020, Jive appears to be dead).
* You are definitely not getting “the full Google” with Startpage.com, but rather results from a cut-down index. After using it for some time I’m now starting to realise how bad it is, in that respect.
* Dogpile is definitely Bing, despite the claim of multiple blended results.
* searx.me sounded good initially (a blend of Bing and Google), but on testing it was immediately apparent that Google doesn’t like them. I vaguely seem to recall that this was also the case a few years back…
Update: still dead at November 2019.
* eTools.ch is a nice blended search-engine, but I see no Google results in any tests. Its ‘News’ tab is also just Bing News, and without the up-to-the-minute timeliness (sorting by ‘last day’ seems useless). Had it been a blend of Google News + Bing News with a fine-grained ‘sort by date’ that showed the last 30 minutes, that would have been superb. But it’s not.
* Mojeek itself. Interesting that it’s not Google, Bing or Yandex, and thus offers an absolute fallback. But it’s not good on general searches, and seems to have a whole lot of old dead sites in its index (e.g. JISC’s circa-2013 opendoar.ooz.cottagelabs.com). Seems to be a little better the more specific you get. Doesn’t work with Google Hit Hider (while Yandex / StartPage / DuckDuckGo do). Despite their ‘News’ link not being clickable when search results are being displayed, a current ‘News’ section is accessible from the Home Page. However, on testing this is revealed as more of a newspaper format — and this is searchable only with the very broadest single keywords, and topical ones at that.
* There’s still no one-box way to search Common Crawl. I would have thought at least one of the Map’s engines would have plugged it into the mix, by now.