{"id":31085,"date":"2020-12-18T17:04:18","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T22:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=31085"},"modified":"2021-01-01T12:10:46","modified_gmt":"2021-01-01T17:10:46","slug":"web-search-indexes-and-ecosia-in-safari","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/18\/web-search-indexes-and-ecosia-in-safari\/","title":{"rendered":"Web Search Indexes and Ecosia in Safari"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daisuke Wakabayashi<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Google holds a significant leg up on Microsoft in more than market share. British competition authorities said Google’s index included about 500 billion to 600 billion web pages, compared with 100 billion to 200 billion for Microsoft.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Via John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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But I’ll bet the overwhelming number of searches are completely satisfied by the contents of pages indexed by Bing. It’s the quality of results that matters most. A 500 billion-page index is useless if it doesn’t surface the correct results.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

What’s more interesting to me is that while there are a number of small search engines, Google and Bing are the only two comprehensive indexes. DuckDuckGo, for example, syndicates the contents of its index from Microsoft. Google has a monopoly on web search no matter how you look at the market, but there’s even less competition for indexing<\/em> the web than there is for user-facing search engines. In fact, I think semantically it sort of breaks the engine<\/em> in “search engine” — the term presupposes that the service showing you the results is the same service that is crawling the web to index them. That’s just not true today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

My experience has been that Google’s results are much better than Bing’s, which are better than DuckDuckGo’s.<\/p>\n\n

Wesley Hilliard<\/a> (via John Gruber<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Ecosia is a search engine that promotes privacy first and plants trees around the world, and with Mondays updates, it is now available as a default search engine setting on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.<\/p>\n

Ecosia uses their income from search ads to fund planting trees around the world in harsh environments. The search engine doesn’t track users, encrypts searches, and anonymizes data within a week of it being created.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

I’m going to give it a try, but given that it relies on the same Bing index I expect to be back with Google soon.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n