Mainstream search engines | Château Tildebeast

What is a mainstream search engine?

What I mean here by 'mainstream' is, rather subjectively, a search engine that you could use as a daily driver in place of Google, Bing et al.

The engines mentioned below vary considerably: some re-present data from a more established engine (again Google, Bing...), while others maintain their own indices. Some aggregate results from a number of other search engines.

I'm no security or privacy expert. This is simply intended to be a handy list. Please also note that a search engine provider's app may do things in the way of tracking and data retention that the website doesn't, and vice versa. Ask around before trusting any enterprise with your searches.

See the other page in this section, niche and experimental search engines, if you fancy a different route.

DuckDuckGo

Site: https://duckduckgo.com

According to this page about search results, DuckDuckGo (DDG) takes the bulk of its links and images from Bing, but also sources popular sites such as Wikipedia, as well as maintaining its own crawler.

At the time of writing (Sept 2024), DDG's security policy stated that they would not store search histories etc.

Search syntax

There doesn't seem to be a way to exclude a term completely. You can, however, specify or exclude a site in results, specify a file format, and a few other things. Apparently DDG is aware of an ongoing problems with some of the syntax. Read the help page for more ideas.