Stephen Shaw's Search Engine Links

Search Engines

Finding information on the Internet is becoming very difficult. Please do try the following search engines.

When researching on the internet, try not to limit yourself to one search engine. There are very few useable search engines left. I will not use any that insist on javascript. Search engines regularly modify their algorithms to reduce hijacked results (sometimes works, sometimes makes things worse!) so your favourite today could serve you junk tomorrow (and be back to best next month).
The various search tools have differing sets of web pages and differing algorithms. For difficult subjects it is usually best to use two or three search engines at least.
I have found it advantageous to try some of the other search engines below.

One Search This is a Bing scraper, run by Verizon, not biased by prior searches, no cookies, encrypted URL. No deluge of sponsored links. Note: Owned by Verizon, who have had issues with privacy in the past!! Usual Bing weaknesses but less the biases so may be more useful. Try it anyway. This form uses moderate safe search. I have to turn off CSS to select search period. Good image search.

Minor Player Possibly not so well known but this has proven good at finding what I am looking for:
Infospace (owned by System1 LLC) seem to have two search engines- Dogpile and Metacrawler. Less ads on Dogpile but a troublesome interface. No date filters. No image search for me. Note- Dogpile has a number of reports of hijacking. DO NOT INSTALL ANYTHING FROM DOGPILE and do not allow scripts.
IMPORTANT: NEVER DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE FROM ANY SEARCH ENGINE- there is a track record of browser hijacking and ad slinging. Best to avoid any that insist on scripting.

DuckDuckGo
Duckduckgo may serve a lot of irrelevant pages (sadly they retain the enormous Ggle spam content) and omits the obvious ones- but not QUITE as much spam as Google where I find often the first half dozen pages are totally irrelevant! Duckduckgo now allows a date filter. No image search works for me. I'd like to place them higher, but they are poor at finding the pages I want.

The Others I will not consider search engines that insist on scripting- they are, as a class, far too unreliable and prone to nasty attacks on your system- some deliberate and some just irresponsible. Gooogle as mentioned above can be very aggressive in insisting on unusable captchas, Yandex is even more aggressive! Mojeek looks promising but is browser-dependant in a hostile manner- I will monitor this for a month looking for an improvement. I absolutely HATE websites that reject certain browsers out of hand.

Specialist Searches

Search text in Gutenberg books Search on the first 100k or so of the text in books held by Project Gutenberg using this subset from Google:

Texts on Archive.org
This is a beta search of texts held on archive.org. To limit the results use a long quote and put in quotation marks "something like this example".

Infogalactic