So it was near impossible to get around the net through Google this morning. I figure the inevitable has started happening like it did to Yahoo - Google is defeating itself with its advertising there for taking my searches through many sites before delivering me to the one I'm attempting to access.

So with a flip of a switch in Fox I set myself to Bing and have had no further issues.

Continued use throughout the day is revealing to me that Bing is not as lackluster as I previously suspected.

How long before M$ sinks Bing with advertising as well?

There's always Start Page. That's my favourite, but the advantage of using Bing is that Mozilla gets paid.

I recently started using DuckDuckGo and would recommend it, even though I don't have any experience beside Google's search.

You've just started working for Microsoft haven't you? Shill!
:-D j/k I'm a DDG convert too. Not quite at Google's level, but quick and good.

Another DDG convert here, although I still use Google for work research purposes.

I use bing a fair bit at work. While I'm starting to prefer its map as being less out of date than Google's, I find that it is also quite talented at not finding what I wan't. I feel like I have to arm wrestle it sometimes to find what I want, or I give up and then find google gets what I want without any effort.

It's an interesting one. We've become so used to Google being the one stop shop. Remember the days of loading five or six search engines? There'd be Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos, Google, something else, all searching for the same thing, and all finding similar but different sites.

Slower, less effecient, but somehow more interesting times.

Damn I'm getting old. Time to Google retirement homes in my area I think... ;-)

Just use the AOL Keywords "Retirement Home." ;)

The thing I really miss is an option to narrow my search by date (like google's "last year" function and similar).
Is there a way to do the same with DDG?

Have a look here:
https://duck.co/help/results/syntax

It is command line driven, so you'll have to type the controls into the search string.

Quite funny now that Firefox is more and more a Google Chrome wannabe.

Love Start Page HTPPS, moved away from Firefox to Pale Moon a long time ago which comes with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine (my second choice anyway), so using Bing wouldn't make a difference either way.

That's really useful, but the option I was looking for isn't there. I guess you just can't do that with DDG.

I did see that. If you go to the Goodies page there is a feedback link. Maybe we should all get on their case to expand their syntax criteria?

Another DDG 'convert' (although I also use Google). IIRC, DDG uses Bing for it's results. And it offers a click-option to 'try' Google, etc. for more results.

I like the bang syntax in DDG. For example a seach like: !d isosceles
brings up the definition of the word.

Or: !i tsunami
brings up images only of them

etc... (there's tons of bang entries - way more than I can remember to use)

One more vote to DuckDuckGo. Give it a try.
There are extra options if you install its extension, instead of using the website.