Best Alternate Search Engines

Recently Gigablast has closed down. This is a sad day for search and for everyone's ability to discover and access a diverse range of information sources. It's also disheartening to see so few mentions of this.

Google's mission was to make the world's information universally accessible, that's a noble and vitally-important mission. But should only a few companies control the world's ability to find that information? Or should there be numerous companies, giving us the option to search around and decide for ourselves what information or viewpoint it is we seek? Now, without Gigablast, we have one less option to do that.

The general consensus will be there are other alternative search engines. But are there alternative search indexes using their own algorithms not tainted by the bigger engines, nor simply regurgitating or designed to return identical results? If not, the information we have access to is still controlled by the few.

Whether Matt from Gigablast knows it or not, our journeys have been similar and somewhat intertwined. We have both worked hard to provide alternative sources of information, pushing back against the gradual slide into an informational echo chamber.