Like most people, for a long time my default search engine has been Google. This is done without question. For two decades Google has been a social consensus, a conventional wisdom.

In fact to question conventional wisdom you need something extraordinarily compelling. That's not easy to come by in the the world of search engines.

A few years back I switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo. I didn't use it because of privacy. Privacy makes a strange selling point; kinda like a beverage that charges you more for the lack of ice or sugar.

DDG remained the default for quite a few years. The search result was fine, it's good enough for most cases until I need to search for something highly specific. By then I append !g to redirect to Google.

Lately I was thinking why stick to DDG when they are so many more unexplored options out there. So I jumped to the next alternative: Brave Search.

Brave Search was my default engine for a month. The search result felt like DDG, not outstanding but good enough. They have this Goggle feature (I think confusingly named by intention) that sounded cool in concept but I didn't end up using it that much. Maybe I should default to that the next time I come back to Brave Search.

By now I can safely say if you don't know what you are looking for, DDG/Brave are in fact superior to Google. But if you are being extremely specific, like an error code with very specific error message, you have to fall back to Google.

In this sense Google is like an overly clever nerd who answers your question in the wrong layer of abstraction; while DDG/Brave are dependable concierge who know just enough to be helpful but not enough to be dangerous.

For a week now I've moved on from Brave Search to You.com. The search result quality feels on par with DDG. Overall satisfaction remains to be seen. But one jarring thing about it is it's not as snappy as the rest. It's not slow enough to be a dealbreaker (we're talking microseconds), only we've been spoilted by instant feedback.

At some point I'm gonna try out something called Neeva.

I don't know what exactly I'm looking for in these alternative engines. Who know if one them happen to stumble into a killer feature that has yet to hit mainstream.

One interesting discovery though was Twitter and Discord. There were numerous points where I was doing investment research. Many projects I was looking into were dangerously edgy. If there were any results in the open web they would age not more than half a year old.

The Google results for these were downright pathetic. In desperation, Twitter-search yielded exactly what I needed. If it's not a direct answer, at least a good enough breadcrumb to lead to something useful.

Similarly if there exist a Discord server for a given project, the search engine within would be decent enough to surface something of quality.

It is well known that many are appending site:reddit.com to Google for better results just from Reddit. Maybe that is the future of search: having to know your niche first then focus the search.

General search for common knowledge is now a solved problem, any alternative engines can do it. The next frontier is made out of many niches, spaces and congregations such that no two areas of interest would make use of similar search-solutions.