• Firebirdie713@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    281·
    6 months ago

    I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol

    https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s

    Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      20·
      6 months ago

      This is a few years old, but:

      Swisscows has built its own German-language web index. For other languages, it uses Bing but queries and results are run through a firewall that strips out personal identifiers such as IP addresses.

      So it wouldn’t solve the problem here of Bing going down, but it’s certainly an interesting option. I may have to consider switching from DDG, idk.

      • Firebirdie713@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

        I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

        Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          I honestly have no issues with Bing’s search engine, I was just pointing out that it probably had an outage just like this one.

          I’m guessing the results are different based on metadata they each pass?