Alternatives to Google Search
Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems. Below are some alternative English-language search engines.
→ Looking for Indexes?
Interesting project: The Search Engine Map
Base search base-search.net claims to be one of the world's most voluminous search engines, especially for academic web resources, providing access to roughly 350 million documents, 60% of them free to access.
Marginalia Search (https://search.marginalia.nu) is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. It lives on a computer in Sweden, and you can see the code that runs it here: https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch
This search engine isn't particularly well equipped to answering queries posed like questions, instead try to imagine some text that might appear in the website you are looking for, and search for that. Where this search engine really shines is finding small, old and obscure websites about some given topic, perhaps old video games, a mystery, theology, the occult, knitting, computer science, or art.
Searx is a metasearch engine, inspired by the seeks project.
It provides basic privacy by mixing your queries with searches on other platforms without storing search data. Queries are made using a POST request on every browser (except chrome). Therefore they show up in neither our logs, nor your url history. In case of Chrome users there is an exception, searx uses the search bar to perform GET requests.
Searx can be added to your browser's search bar; moreover, it can be set as the default search engine.
Wiby.me (https://wiby.me) caught my eye because when I clicked on the "Surprise Me!" button it immediately showed me a page on the philosophy of Sim City written in 1994!
Search the catalogue of 20 000 worldwide libraries through worldcat.org. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need! (I need all of them!)
DuckDuckGo, the self-styled “internet privacy company” — which, for years, has built a brand around a claim of non-tracking web search and, more recently, launched its own ‘private’ browser with built-in tracker blocking — has found itself in hot water after a researcher found hidden limits on its tracking protection that create a carve-out for certain advertising data requests by its search syndication partner, Microsoft.