Someone already did it! https://duckduckgo.com/

Some weird reason duckduckgo usually gives worse search results than google.

I repeatedly tried "living in another search-engine" for a month at a time. I tried Bing, DDG and Yahoo. If I didn't search for something easy (like "population new york") the results were useless and superficial.

Searching for something like "programatically create credit memo magento" yielded the user documentation on how to create a credit memo while Googles first result was the relevant API page with the second being forum posts explaining how to do what I wanted.

If you need specific results and don't get them, you go back to Google.

I use DDG, but honestly still go to google a lot. The secret is DDG allows "bangs" -- !g in front of a query is a google search. It turns the Chrome omnibox into an even more powerful tool.

Or behind, nice when you ddg search wasn't useful, just append a !g and hit return.

DDG is my default, and I'm quite happy with it.

I have been using DDG for a long time now and have never had that problem. Except with images. So I still use google for that.:-)

The reason is Google probably has 100x the money, and 1000x the expertise.

I love DuckDuckGo for their no-following and no-tracking you policy. I admire that and want to support them. But yet, I know that many, many of the queries are usually yield far better results on Google.

I'm just hoping that with time and enough people using DuckDuckGo, it will get a lot better.

Possibly more data too. AI + more data = more useful results.

Because they don’t track you so can’t make assumptions about what you want/mean.

Trade offs.

I like what Google gives me in return for consuming my data, personally.

Sure. That’s totally a valid position.

I think there’s a middle ground though - and Google is far far on one side of it.

Perhaps your children and grand-children will be less thankful. Your data will stay around.