Pretty much everyone who’s switched on a computer or smartphone has had to use Google at some point. Back when Google launched in 1998, the nascent Search Engine business was a lot more competitive and diverse. Google wasn’t even the first Search Engine, but ask anyone if there are any real competitors to Google and they’ll either shrug or mention distant runners-up Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing, both of which are frequently shoehorned into software packages to the chagrin of their users.

However, both Yahoo and Bing are very similar in form and function to Google. The problem that these platforms face is that Google has become shorthand for “search engine”: it utterly dominates the industry it performs in and is rapidly finding new ways to push Google Search onto other platforms, such as Google Chrome and the Google Search function that’s available on most Android phones.

While most people find Google to be more than adequate, there are concerns that can be had with Google: pervasive tracking of search engine queries and user behaviour, the abundance of paid advertisements which can overtake relevant results, and its somewhat limited focus on web searching. There are a number of alternatives available that can resolve these questions, so have a look at these:

Privacy and Tracking

Google has acquired an unfortunate but justifiable reputation for tracking and analysing user data without asking the user if that’s OK first. While the vast majority of people in free, democratic states don’t have to worry about being persecuted for their searches, it does mean that everyone who uses Google services is being tracked by Google, mostly for innocuous reasons; tailoring ads and search results, for example. For those that desire privacy over convenience, there’s two search engines you could use: DuckDuckGo and StartPage.

Both are designed without the user-tracking features that Google is saddled with, meaning that your searches won’t be used to tailor advertisements or leave a breadcrumb trail for snoopers. DuckDuckGo follows Google’s user design to a tee, so switching between the two won’t feel too strange. It also offers a small performance upgrade over Google, as it doesn’t need to load ads for you. StartPage goes several steps further by not using cookies (trackers, basically) and a proxy server (which masks your IP from trackers) so you can browse the web in full confidence that you’re safe from Google’s all-seeing eye.

A Broader Focus

While Google is more than capable of bringing you to sites that feature the content you’re looking for, it has some trouble showing you that content by Google. For instance, if you’re looking for Copyright-free images on Google, there are filters on Google Images that can remove non-free use images, but Google won’t have every image that’s available and sometimes Google will return a non-free use image anyway.

Looking for a great GIF to add to a conversation with friends can also be a chore on Google. If you want a quick answer to a question that’s brewing in your head, using Google can give you rather contradictory results, and in some cases promote a wrong answer simply because it’s popular.

Here’s two alternatives: CC Search and Giphy. CC stands for Creative Commons, which is a generic name for various free-use content that you can use for commercial use, though whether it’ll require some modification first varies from picture to picture. CC Search can scour the internet for an image, video or audio file of your choosing, using websites like Flickr, Youtube, Soundcloud and Pixabay, and turn out results on one page.

Giphy is rather limited in scope, but it’s better than Google for GIF searching. When using Google for GIF collection, it’s hard to tell the difference between a GIF or a JPEG. Having a vast collection of GIFs in one place and previewing them for you, Giphy is the place to go if you need a perfect reaction image quickly.

Questions & Answers

When you want a sensible answer to a question or debunk a story you’ve heard, Quora and Snopes are your friends. Quora requires a Facebook or Google account to use, but once you’re in you can get answers to questions about history, science and other subjects.

Snopes, on the other hand, is all about debunking the myths you’ll hear on the internet from time to time. We live in an era of fake news, fake diet fads and fake science being pushed on a massive scale on social media sites, so take a look at Snopes if you’ve heard a ridiculous claim being made.

There’s a huge number of alternatives to Google for web users, many of them filling niches that Google’s jack-of-all-trades approach can’t fill. When you need to get information or content that Google can’t provide, or don’t want to be tracked for whatever reason, there’s always an alternative. Chetaru is a Web Design Agency based in Darlington that provides the IT know-how that your firm needs to succeed and thrive, from beautiful responsive websites to economical SEO campaigns and useful mobile Apps.

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