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Comment by vimy | Hacker News Reader

A decent Google alternative I found recently is https://www.qwant.com . So far it seems comparable to Google results, no complaints yet. Much better than DuckDuckGo or Bing in my experience. They use their own crawler.

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I'm glad to see more competition, but I'm disappointed to see that it's basically a clone. There is so much room for differentiation that nobody is exploring, I'm thinking about taking a shot at it.

I’m curious, what would you want to differentiate in? As far as I’m concerned, Google achieved an almost perfect search engine maybe 5-10 years ago, before they started pushing their ads harder, hiding the page address, and all these other user-hostile behaviors they’ve been taking in the near past.

I just want a service that gives me the most relevant result as the first option, with no distractions.

Not GP but: would be nice to have a search engine that penalises content marketing and ad-heavy websites. The web is flooded with bad content, and Google doesn't seem to care, since it brings money to them.

There's also too much duplicate junk: it would be nice to search for a song title and not being given 20 pages of copycat lyrics websites. Or 20 pages of copycat guitar tab websites. Also: software aggregators, Wikipedia mirrors, Stack Overflow mirrors, Github mirrors. I mean they're all the same, maybe just aggregate them together?

Would also be nice to be able to filter out, or at least de-emphasise things like: piracy download sites, fake download sites, fake ebook sites. Of course that would need some curation.

I spent a few years working at a search startup. I would say Google is ready to squash competition like a bug but really you're more like a bug getting splatted on their windscreen. Most of the time they don't even consider you to be competition. Maybe in some ways that's a good thing - if they don't consider you to be a threat then you've got some room to innovate. Until you get big enough that you show up on their radar... then they can just copy whatever you've been doing differently.

Isn't that the clone that's using bing results and public subsidies to pretend it's a EU unicorn and gather support from nationalists?

Sorry if it's rude, but that's my take on it - a public subsidies scam. The hatred for US companies in the EU can't justify everything.

I didn't know about qwant's existence until your comment and I just made it my default engine. It seems like a Google clone, and better than duckduckgo.com which is perfect. No more drop downs getting in my way of clicking on results.

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