The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

I think we've all known for a long time that Google has fallen far from the status as the best search engine. Results are:

• Clogged with advertisements
• Rigged focusing on Google properties and those sites who pay, rather than what you're actually looking for or what would actually solve your problems.
• Little interest in privacy

For these reasons, it's less than surprising that Google has to pay Apple around 15 billion a year to keep it the default browser on iOS. Maybe it was the far and away the best search tool years back but now?

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So this brings us to the topic of alternatives, which we've covered at some length.

The problem with these is that everyone has based evaluations on ALL operations that can be done with a search engine. And because of the astonishing size of the internet, really only only Bing and Bing-powered web searches are able to answer that test. As a result, most engines I see advertise either a better interface, improved privacy, or some capability with a specific search.

I'm going to try something different. I'll be looking at this entirely from our sites' perspective. Does it help me search this site better than other tools? Are we listed near the top for the terms we should be attached to i.e. "portable" and "freeware"?

What follows are the results inside individual posts...

Bing / DuckDuckGo

https://www.bing.com / https://www.duckduckgo.com

These two services have very similar results, so I'm going to do them both at the same time. Overall not great and not bad.

* Portable freeware - top result
* Portable software - #12 and several of the results above it are crap
* download portable - #18
* Portable apps - #9 (this needs to be portableapps.com but I'd like to be in the top 10)
* Searching our site (searchterm site:portablefreeware.com) - works fine, no issues

Related thread:

The !pfw DuckDuckGo tweak

Neeva

This one so far gives the best results, except for those searches focused on our site.

http://www.neeva.com

* Portable freeware - top result
* Portable software - #5
* download portable - #6
* Portable apps - #12 (this needs to be portableapps.com but I'd like to be in the top 10)
* Searching our site (searchterm site:portablefreeware.com) - not great ... short pages with little data

You

http://www.you.com

Just okay, not something I'll likely use in the future for our site.

* Portable freeware - top result
* Portable software - #7
* download portable - #10
* Portable apps - n/a - we didn't come up past the first two pages so not a good result (this needs to be portableapps.com but I'd like to be in the top 10)
* Searching our site (searchterm site:portablefreeware.com) - didn't seem to work correctly, maybe they have a different syntax for this function, I don't know.

Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy:
https://www.wired.com/story/google-sear ... democracy/

Try: etools.ch eTools.ch searches major Swiss and international search engines and offers you the best results in full privacy!

From the eTools.ch website:

The following 17 search engines are queried in parallel:

Ask
Base
Bing
Brave
DuckDuckGo
Exalead
Fastbot
Google
Lilo
Mojeek
Moose
Qwant
Search
Tiger
Wikipedia
Yahoo
Yandex

Currently, a complete search takes on average 1.70 seconds.

https://search.brave.com/search?q=Portable+freeware

Number 1 result.

Toxteth O'Grady wrote: ↑Wed Aug 17, 2022 10:00 am https://search.brave.com/search?q=Portable+freeware

Number 1 result.

Good add, thanks.

While I am not a fan of Brave as a browser or a company, I have to say their search engine looks excellent. And in terms of the selfish search engine test, they're top shelf.

https://www.tuxdex.com/ portable freeware -> first few results - can't link the search because

Anonymous Search Engine
We do not track and we will not share your information with third parties.
Your search queries and the results are encrypted and the query is not visible in the address bar.
We do not use cookies.

lintalist wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 12:41 pm Your search queries and the results are encrypted and the query is not visible in the address bar.

Ha! Nice. It's a feature, not a bug

https://searx.org/
portable freeware #1

Searx is a metasearch engine, aggregating the results of other search engines while not storing information about its users.

Anybody can host an instance afaik.
https://searx.org/about
https://github.com/searx/searx

Other searx-websites via https://searx.space/

https://gigablast.com/search?c=main&qla ... e+freeware
#1

It's no secret that Google has some significant downsides, like all those annoying ads and their sketchy privacy practices. But the good news is, there are plenty of alternatives out there.

Update on this:

lintalist wrote: ↑Fri Aug 19, 2022 9:04 am https://searx.org/

Performance around some of the terms checked on other sites: