Have a question? Just google it! This has a become a common term. Don't get me wrong, I love google results but I don't like the google as a company. Just a simple search tells you all about google's advents to collect your data and use it as they like. Google's privacy policy clearly states that they can use your data as they like. It is not even possible to read some of these licenses without having the help of a law student! That is the level of effort put into these licenses. These are not easy like the MIT License or the GPL License which are the mostly used in open source projects, they are written to be confusing. I won't cover why google is bad in the post but I will show you a very popular alternative to google, duckduckgo.
Duckduckgo was one of the first real and usable alternatives to google and was not just trying to copy google but introduce features which honestly makes google search look old. Duckduckgo doesn't use google results and show them privately like startpage which is another good alternative for people who want google results but privately, it actually is a search engine of it's own and is slowly gaining popularity.
One disclaimer for people who are believer of the open source mission, duckduckgo is closed source, but that doesn't mean you can't use it with a little trust. You should never really fully trust any software but open source projects and some trusted closed source software come pretty close. One more thing I would like to tell you is duckduckgo results are not always the best. I mean they are just fine and if your queries are about technology and other "techy stuff", the results I found were very good. I would go as far to say that they were better that google, but other queries that were related to academics and social media searchs, the results were not very good.
DuckDuckGo bangs are actually one of the most nifty little features of duckduckgo that go unnoticed but a seriously addicting. Ever since I have switch to duckduckgo as my defalut search engine on all the web browsers I use (I use brave search with brave though 😊), I literaly can't use any other search engines any more without missing duckduckgo. Bangs eliminate the need for useless bookmarks for google, youtube, github and other major sites. You can even submit your own at ddg bangs.
So if you are convinced to change now, be sure to prompt duckduckgo as well, so more people get to know about this awesome alternative to google search. Thanks for reading. If you want to share this article, download the pdf below.