Everyone in Italy uses Google as an internet search engine. Few others, perhaps only because when installing Windows it is the default search engine on Internet Explorer, they use Bing, Microsoft's search engine which now also powers Yahoo searches.
Those who want to refine their results, find things that Google cannot find, search for more precise answers, especially if they are looking for guides or ways of doing things, can carry out more in-depth searches using two other alternatives : DuckDuckGo and StartPage, two search engines who are increasingly establishing themselves as main competitors compared to the big monopoly giants.
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On the one hand, Microsoft's Bing remains a somewhat crude and less dynamic search engine, which often offers search results from old or outdated web pages. Furthermore, if perhaps searches in English are more relevant, those in Italian still leave a lot to be desired, especially if the search key is made up of three or more words.
Google, clearly better than Bing, often manages to be precise and is perfect when looking for fresh news. Recently, however, it has changed its "democratic" policy favoring big brands and often failing to identify sites for some searches (try, for example, to search for " Yahooo messenger 2011 " where, at the moment, the Yahoo site is inexplicably the second result). In addition, the suspicion that Google rewards the sites they pay to promote themselves (which has been repeatedly denied but never convincingly) and the fact that Google (which is not a public service but a private company that aims to profit) traces internet searches of users (see post on what Google knows about us) could indispose some who would prefer more privacy and results less tied to big brands (especially its brands) and political and social impositions.
I am not saying here to change the search engine and abandon Google but, since the monopolies are not truly free and since both Google and Microsoft track every search for advertising purposes, it can be useful to bookmark these websites that can be used as anonymous search engines .
1) StartPage calls itself the most private search engine in the world .
Unlike other search engines, StartPage does not record user IP addresses and does not share personal data with any external company as it is written on the privacy information page).
You may notice that searches with StartPage are based on Google in Italian and are in https, the encrypted and non-interceptable internet protocol.
StartPage then provides a private proxy that can be used to open any page found by the search, so that you can open obscured sites in Italy or to subscribe to unavailable services.
Using StartPage, in its localized version for the Italian language, you can see an excellent relevance of the results for searches made with one or two words. The results start to mix and ruin if you go looking for things using too many words, just like in Bing (whose results, however, are different).
Like Bing, if you search for the name of a product or company, the first result may not be the official fact sheet of that company or product, but something else useless. Google remains the best in this because, at least in the top 5 results, it should always come up with an official source.
StartPage opens each site in a new tab, which is very convenient to avoid going back every time.
StartPage also has a phone book and is one of the main sites where to find the address and name of a person by phone number
2) DuckDuckGO is another emerging search engine that is catching on in the poor search engine competition dominated by Google.
DuckDuckGO has a great value compared to Google and Bing: it is an open source and free, uncensored search engine that fully respects user privacy without tracking searches and without collecting data to be used for advertising purposes.
Being an anonymous search engine, for websites found through Duck Duck Go, it is not possible to identify the user. In addition, the results are not affected, as is the case with Google, by previous searches.
First of all, going to Duck Duck Go, press on the logo and then click, from the menu at the top right, on the preferences (settings) to set the Italian language if you want to find sites written in Italian .
Depending on the search term, you will be able to view some information at the top that allows you to refine your search with the suggested terms. DDG becomes great when looking for the name of a product or service or company because the first result is always the official website which, sometimes, is also labeled. On the right you can also get some research ideas to find other related information.
Going back to the settings tab, always from the top right corner, you can find out how much DDG is customizable, both in colors and graphics and in the privacy settings.
In a nutshell, you can edit anything you want as you like.
Duck Duck can also be used in a lite version, even lighter and stripped of superfluous elements. With Duck Duck Go you can also use some very useful command parameters to search other sites such as Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook etc. To do this, just write, for example , ! Google pomhey to search for the word pomhey on Google or ! Facebook Navigaweb to search for Navigaweb on Facebook and so on for many other sites visible on this page.
3) OneSearch is a new anonymous search site that takes results from Bing and promises not to record searches. The flaw with OneSearch is that it is owned by Verizon.
Although it is still inevitable to use Google and not change the default search engine of the browser, I would give StartPage and, above all, to DuckDuckGO a chance, both because they are anonymous private search engines, and because they find what Google is not found, either because, for some types of research, they offer the best results, unaffected by strong powers and censorship.
