Honestly, this kind of goes for everything that’s more complicated than average people can understand. (By “average” I mean “anyone not familiar with this particular knowledge.” I have in depth IT knowledge but very weak automobile maintenance knowledge, for example. This makes me “average” when it comes to automobile maintenance.)
I don’t give out IT advice for the most part, because the number of people who will come hounding you because they misunderstood, did something wrong, or missed several steps, is too damn high. Doesn’t matter that they made the choice to take initiative to do it on their own, now it’s your fault for suggesting it when their PC blows up in their face.
I have high quality DVD rips of the entire series plus rips of shorts from Short Attention Span Theater that preceded Dr. Katz, as well as the aforementioned live episode, with one of my favorite Maria Bamford performances (“I wish you were different!” “I am different!”)
H. Jon Benjamin will always live in my mind as Ben Katz.
Also Dr. Katz was ahead of its time in “kindness television.” We have stuff like Ted Lasso or Joe Pera now that is less snarky and mean, but in the 90’s only Dr. Katz was so full of love he let his adult son live with him indefinitely.
When people search, we believe they’re really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, lyrics, weather, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (e.g., Tripadvisor), content site (e.g., Musixmatch), or dedicated source (e.g., Dark Sky) that does a better job of actually answering searches than a general search engine can with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources.
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
Partners and Privacy: As per our strict privacy policy, we never share any personal information with any of our partners that could lead to the creation of search histories. When we send a request to a partner for information used in search results, the transfer of information is proxied through our servers so it stays anonymous. That means our partners see those requests as though they came from us instead of our users, and no unique identifiers are passed in that process (e.g., your IP address). That way, we can work with partners to produce relevant search result pages, while keeping you anonymous to them (and us!).
So they use some in-house tools and they source other results “largely” from Bing.
I’ve heard far more people using it for helping with simple coding exercises and helping them approach coding problems than I have heard of people using it for research.
I wouldn’t be doing much of any research through AI for exactly that reason myself. It hallucinates too much.
So, like I said, it depends on what you’re using each one for. People seem to be having success with Bing and programming, but less so with Bing and anything actually human-life related.
I would say that there isn’t currently a “best alternative” but rather there is a small group of alternatives that each seem to have “use cases” as it were (shocker, kind of how it used to be in the 90s/00s before Google dominance). But even from person to person, people disagree on what the best use case for each is.
There’s some focused more on “privacy” like DuckDuckGo and searX.
I’ve heard Bing has pretty good results for anything AI related for all Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI.
I’ve heard good things about Qwant for music searches.
Someone else here in this thread just brought up Mojeek, which is supposed to be also privacy focused but includes searching by “emotion.”
Presearch is decentralized, but I haven’t looked “under the hood” of how its decentralization works.
Startpage is Google search results but behind a proxy so Google isn’t getting your info when you search.
I mean, it seems like there’s a lot of decent alternatives. I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left of the shell of Yahoo! started investing in trying to outperform Google at this point.