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Add You.com under Bing, remove ask.moe

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Ask.moe uses Google Custom Search now, so it's not a search engine
anymore; it's a search client.

Lots of people asked about You.com so I put it under Bing.
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6
content/posts/search-engines-with-own-indexes.gmi
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@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ These are large engines that pass all my standard tests and more.
* Givero
* Swisscows
* Fireball
* Ask.moe⁷
* You.com
* Partially powers MetaGer by default; this can be turned off
* At this point, I mostly stopped adding Bing-based search engines. There are just too many.
@ -428,10 +428,6 @@ He also gave me some useful details about Seznam, Naver, Baidu, and Goo:
⁶ Yippy claims to be powered by a certain IBM brand (a brand that could correspond to any number of products) and annotates results with the phrase “Yippy Index”, but a side-by-side comparison with Bing and other Bing-based engines revealed results to be nearly identical.
⁷ Ask.moe was working on a FLOSS indexer; its search page stated an intention to switch to it from Bing at one point. This statement has since been removed.
=> https://git.sr.ht/~danskeren/spider.moe FLOSS indexer
⁸ This is based on a statement Right Dao made in on Reddit:
=> https://reddit.com/comments/k4clx1/_/ge9dwmh/?context=1 Right Dao on Reddit

20
content/posts/search-engines-with-own-indexes.md
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@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ These are large engines that pass all my standard tests and more.
- Givero
- Swisscows
- Fireball
- Ask.moe[^6]
- You.com
- Partially powers MetaGer by default; this can be turned off
- At this point, I mostly stopped adding Bing-based search engines. There are just too many.
- Yandex: originally a Russian search engine, it now has an English version. Some Russian results bleed into its English site. Like Bing, it allows submitting pages and sitemaps for crawling using the IndexNow API. Powers:
@ -81,7 +81,7 @@ Google, Bing, and Yandex support structured data such as microformats1, microdat
These engines pass most of the tests listed in the "methodology" section. All of them seem relatively privacy-friendly.
- [Right Dao](https://rightdao.com): very fast, good results. Passes the tests fairly well. It plans on including query-based ads if/when its user base grows.[^7]
- [Right Dao](https://rightdao.com): very fast, good results. Passes the tests fairly well. It plans on including query-based ads if/when its user base grows.[^6]
- [Gigablast](https://gigablast.com/): It's been around for a while and also sports a classic web directory. Searches are a bit slow, and it charges to submit sites for crawling. It powers [Private.sh](https://private.sh). Gigablast is tied with Right Dao for quality.
@ -121,7 +121,7 @@ Results from these search engines don't seem at all useful.
Engines in this category fall back to GBY when their own indexes don't have enough results. As their own indexes grow, some claim that this should happen less often.
- [Brave Search](https://search.brave.com/): Many tests (including all the tests I listed in the "Methodology" section) resulted results identical to Google, revealed by a side-by-side comparison with Google, Startpage, and a Searx instance with only Google enabled. Brave claims that this is due to how Cliqz (the discontinued engine acquired by Brave) used query logs to build its page models and was optimized to match Google.[^8] The index is independent, but optimizing against Google resulted in too much similarity for the real benefit of an independent index to show. Furthermore, many queries have Bing results mixed in; users can click an "info" button to see the percentage of results that came from its own index. The independent percentage is typically quite high (often close to 100% independent) but can drop for advanced queries.
- [Brave Search](https://search.brave.com/): Many tests (including all the tests I listed in the "Methodology" section) resulted results identical to Google, revealed by a side-by-side comparison with Google, Startpage, and a Searx instance with only Google enabled. Brave claims that this is due to how Cliqz (the discontinued engine acquired by Brave) used query logs to build its page models and was optimized to match Google.[^7] The index is independent, but optimizing against Google resulted in too much similarity for the real benefit of an independent index to show. Furthermore, many queries have Bing results mixed in; users can click an "info" button to see the percentage of results that came from its own index. The independent percentage is typically quite high (often close to 100% independent) but can drop for advanced queries.
- [Plumb](https://plumb.one/): Almost all queries return no results; when this happens, it falls back to Google. It's fairly transparent about the fallback process, but I'm concerned about _how_ it does this: it loads Google's Custom Search scripts from `cse.google.com` onto the page to do a client-side Google search. This can be mitigated by using a browser addon to block `cse.google.com` from loading any scripts. Plumb claims that this is a temporary measure while its index grows, and they're planning on getting rid of this. Allows submitting URLs, but requires solving an hCaptcha. This engine is very new; hopefully as it improves, it could graduate from this section. Its Chief Product Officer [previously founded](https://archive.is/oVAre) the Gibiru search engine which shares the same affiliates and (for now) the same index; the indexes will diverge with time.
- [Neeva](https://neeva.com): Combines Bing results with results from its own index. Bing normally isn't okay with this, but Neeva is one of few exceptions. As of right now, results are mostly identical to Bing but original links not found by Bing frequently pop up. Long and esoteric queries are less likely to feature original results. Requires signing up with an email address or OAuth to use, and offers a paid tier with additional benefits.
- [Qwant](https://www.qwant.com): Qwant claims to use its own index, but it still relies on Bing for most results. It seems to be in a position similar to Neeva. Try a side-by-side comparison to see if or how it compares with Bing.
@ -143,7 +143,7 @@ These indexing search engines don’t have a Google-like “ask me anything” e
These engines try to find a website, typically at the domain-name level. They don't focus on capturing particular pages within websites.
- [search.tl](http://www.search.tl/): Generalist search for one <abbr title="top-level domain">TLD</abbr> at a time (defaults to .com). I'm not sure why you'd want to always limit your searches to a single TLD, but now you can.[^9] There isn't any visible UI for changing the TLD for available results; you need to add/change the `tld` URL parameter. For example, to search .org sites, append `&tld=org` to the URL. It seems to be connected to [Amidalla](http://www.amidalla.de/). Amidalla allows users to manually add URLs to its index and directory; I have yet to see if doing so impacts search.tl results.
- [search.tl](http://www.search.tl/): Generalist search for one <abbr title="top-level domain">TLD</abbr> at a time (defaults to .com). I'm not sure why you'd want to always limit your searches to a single TLD, but now you can.[^8] There isn't any visible UI for changing the TLD for available results; you need to add/change the `tld` URL parameter. For example, to search .org sites, append `&tld=org` to the URL. It seems to be connected to [Amidalla](http://www.amidalla.de/). Amidalla allows users to manually add URLs to its index and directory; I have yet to see if doing so impacts search.tl results.
- [Thunderstone](https://search.thunderstone.com/texis/websearch21/): A combined website catalog and search engine that focuses on categorization. Its [about page](https://search.thunderstone.com/texis/websearch19/about.html) claims: <q cite="https://search.thunderstone.com/texis/websearch19/about.html">We continuously survey all primary COM, NET, and ORG web-servers and distill their contents to produce this database. This is an index of _sites_ not pages. It is very good at finding companies and organizations by purpose, product, subject matter, or location. If you're trying to finding things like _'BillyBob's personal beer can page on AOL'_, try Yahoo or Dogpile.</q> This seems to be the polar opposite of the engines in the ["small or non-commercial Web" category](#small-or-non-commercial-web).
- [sengine.info](https://www.sengine.info/): only shows domains, not individual pages. Developed by netEstate GmbH, which specializes in content extraction for inprints and job ads. Also has a German-only version available. Discovered in my access logs.
- [Gnomit](https://www.gnomit.com/): Allows single-keyword queries and returns sites that seem to cover a related topic. I actually kind of enjoy using it; results are old (typically from 2009) and a bit random, but make for a nice way to discover something new. For instance, searching for "IRC" helped me discover new IRC networks I'd never heard of.
@ -222,7 +222,7 @@ Why bother using non-mainstream search engines?
### Conflicts of interest
Google, Microsoft (the company behind Bing), and Yandex aren't just search engine companies; they're content and ad companies as well. For example, Google hosts video content on YouTube and Microsoft hosts social media content on LinkedIn. This gives these companies a powerful incentive to prioritize their own content. They are able to do so even if they claim that they treat their own content the same as any other: since they have complete access to their search engines' inner workings, they can tailor their content pages to better fit their algorithms and tailor their algorithms to work well on their own content. They can also index their own content without limitations but throttle indexing for other crawlers.[^10]
Google, Microsoft (the company behind Bing), and Yandex aren't just search engine companies; they're content and ad companies as well. For example, Google hosts video content on YouTube and Microsoft hosts social media content on LinkedIn. This gives these companies a powerful incentive to prioritize their own content. They are able to do so even if they claim that they treat their own content the same as any other: since they have complete access to their search engines' inner workings, they can tailor their content pages to better fit their algorithms and tailor their algorithms to work well on their own content. They can also index their own content without limitations but throttle indexing for other crawlers.[^9]
One way to avoid this conflict of interest is to _use search engines that aren't linked to major content providers;_ i.e., use engines with their own independent indexes.
@ -313,14 +313,12 @@ Some of this content came from the [Search Engine Map](https://www.searchenginem
[^5]: Yippy claims to be powered by a certain IBM brand (a brand that could correspond to any number of products) and annotates results with the phrase "Yippy Index", but a side-by-side comparison with Bing and other Bing-based engines revealed results to be nearly identical.
[^6]: Ask.moe was working on a [FLOSS indexer](https://git.sr.ht/~danskeren/spider.moe); its search page stated an intention to switch to it from Bing at one point. This statement has since been removed.
[^6]: This is based on a statement Right Dao made in [on Reddit](https://reddit.com/comments/k4clx1/_/ge9dwmh/?context=1) ([archived](https://web.archive.org/web/20210320042457/https://i.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/k4clx1/right_dao_a_new_independent_search_engine_that/ge9dwmh/?context=1)).
[^7]: This is based on a statement Right Dao made in [on Reddit](https://reddit.com/comments/k4clx1/_/ge9dwmh/?context=1) ([archived](https://web.archive.org/web/20210320042457/https://i.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/k4clx1/right_dao_a_new_independent_search_engine_that/ge9dwmh/?context=1)).
[^7]: More information can be found in [this HN subthread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27593801) and some posts on the Cliqz tech blog ([one](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine-from-scratch.html), [two](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-10/search-quality-at-cliqz.html)).
[^8]: More information can be found in [this HN subthread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27593801) and some posts on the Cliqz tech blog ([one](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine-from-scratch.html), [two](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-10/search-quality-at-cliqz.html)).
[^8]: Some search engines support the `site:` search operator to limit searches to subpages or subdomains of a single site or TLD. `site:.one`, for instance, limits searches to websites with the ".one" TLD.
[^9]: Some search engines support the `site:` search operator to limit searches to subpages or subdomains of a single site or TLD. `site:.one`, for instance, limits searches to websites with the ".one" TLD.
[^10]: Matt from Gigablast told me that indexing YouTube or LinkedIn will get you blocked if you aren't Google or Microsoft. I imagine that you could do so by getting special permission if you're a megacorporation.
[^9]: Matt from Gigablast told me that indexing YouTube or LinkedIn will get you blocked if you aren't Google or Microsoft. I imagine that you could do so by getting special permission if you're a megacorporation.