(vanity) HELP - Search engines? Bing has gone homo

me | 6/24/18 | me

[the OlLine Rebel]

I've been using Bing for a few years now, since I finally got sick of Google's endless parade of commie-celebrating "art".

Bing was always nicely photographic, usually just nature and points of interest.

But today, its POI is a Minneapolis bridge with "pride" multi-colors on it. (And yes, they do describe their pix, so it's on there specifically.)

[the OlLine Rebel]

Thanks guys for all the info. I’ll be trying them out.

[TheConservativeParty]

www.duckduckgo.com

[TBP]

duckduckgo
dogpile

Those are the ones I use most.

[LeoTDB69]

Cool link. Like a trip down Memory Lane for old-timers on the net. Webcrawler and Altavista were my main search options back around the mid-90’s.

[the OlLine Rebel]

AltaVista, that’s what it was.

That and Excite were my engines. They allowed Boolean which was so awesome. Even Google advanced stinks compared to that.

[YogicCowboy]

Startpage/Ixquick.

[YogicCowboy]

Not silly, but true. Human nature.

[YogicCowboy]

Thanks.

[Songcraft]

Bing is also mentioned in this old song -- "Splish Splash".

"...Bing, bang, I saw the whole gang
Dancin' on my living room rug, yeah..."

[trebb]

Yep - DuckDuckGo

[cynwoody]

AltaVista, that’s what it was.

That and Excite were my engines. They allowed Boolean which was so awesome. Even Google advanced stinks compared to that.

I was around for that battle. My favorite at the time was AltaVista, because it had the most knobs to fine-tune the search.

But then Google came along. Just type (or, nowadays, speak) it in. No knobs, superior results!

I was sold.

[the OlLine Rebel]

No, I find Google frustrating, even with the Advanced page which is supposed to do that Boolean logic for you. It never seems to believe me that I really want an exact phrase. It stinks.

Meanwhile I could Boolean back then on AV or Ex and get those phrases exactly.

[cynwoody]

Try turning on Verbatim. Click Tools then change All Results to Verbatim. For instance, compare what comes back for mapb agarose normally vs mapb agarose in verbatim mode. In the first query (normal mode), Google has decided to include pages mentioning "map", as can be seen by what it bold-faces in the abstracts. In the second query (vebatim mode), it focuses strictly on "mapb" and not on the general concept of mapping.

You can also put double quotes around a word that looks mistyped. E.g., "mapb" agarose.

In the case of highly specific queries, such as the example, both verbatim and quoting dramatically reduce the extraneous results caused by Google's advanced algorithms, which help for most queries, but screw up some.

[the OlLine Rebel]

Thanks.

But I basically echo what the 1 commenter there states! Not an expert, but I know when I want an exact phrase and I know how to use Boolean!