Wwhen he searches the internet, he usually does it with Google. The market share of the search engine in Germany lies with the web traffic analysis service According to Statcounter Stable at a good 90 percent.
“Apart from that, only Bing from Microsoft has some relevance with around 5.5 percent, but this is certainly due to the integration into Windows,” says Jörg Geiger from the specialist magazine “Chip”. But both Google and Bing are search engines that diligently collect and use the data of their users.
In addition to targeted advertising, this is also noticeable in the search results: “The search results for one and the same term can be quite different with these search engines, depending on who is searching,” explains Wolfgang Stieler from the “Technology Review”. Because the algorithms of Google and Bing also take into account the surfing behavior of the user in the search results.
In principle, search engines all work in a similar way. Small programs called crawlers comb through the web, analyzing and indexing the content of websites. The search providers can then access this search index for search queries and display suitable hit lists.
What matters is which hits are at the top. According to Stieler, the Google ranking is mainly based on how often a website is linked by others, plus factors such as keywords, location or relevance.
Google’s large group of users and the resulting network effect are part of the success of success. Because the more users clicked a certain page for a topic, the more relevant it will also be for the search results.
Search engine alternatives to Google
But there are alternatives to Google. In the event of a competitor comparison test by “Chip”, the start page was particularly convincing. “The site basically uses a trick, because it forwards search queries to Google anonymously, so the search results themselves are very good,” explains Jörg Geiger.
The search engines Duckduckgo and Qwant delivered similarly good results in the test. The big advantage is: “The users are not tracked here.”
And then there are the meta search engines as alternatives. They bundle the hits from various search providers and list the pages from which the search hits come.
A well -known provider is meta. Behind it is a non -profit organization from Germany with servers in Germany. “Data protection is lived here, but old acquaintances are used as sources, such as Bing, Yandex or Yahoo,” says Geiger. Another meta search engine with many sources is “etools.ch”.
According to Geiger, technically experienced users could also fall back on the offer of “searx.info”. “This is also a meta search engine, but you can set which search engines you want to tap into.” So the alternatives to Google are there, but they are rarely used.
According to Wolfgang Stieler, this is also due to convenience: “Google is the default search engine in many browsers and only very few users bother to select another provider in the menu.”
Change search engine settings from Google
If you want to quench Google’s thirst for data, you can change the search engine settings in your Google account. The “Web & App Activities” function can be deactivated there, explains André Hesel from “Computer Bild”: “This prevents certain activities such as searches and page history from being stored in the Google account at all.”
Even better: At least on notebooks or PCs, don’t surf with a registered Google account. Before searching, check “Google.de” in the top right-hand corner to see whether you are logged in and log out if necessary.
The search behavior of the users could also change with new technologies. Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and here, above all, language models with chatbots such as “Chatgpt”.
Not only Microsoft made it a Ki search for Bing. The US start-up Neeva also developed a search engine offer from “Chatgpt”.
AI search not yet reliable
The NEEVA offer searches pages by voice command and then creates short or long text documents for the users. This can be interesting, for example, for an overview of various book or film reviews. “The AI then reads through ten reviews and creates a summary of how a book or film is rated,” explains Stieler.
Incidentally, Neeva also dispenses with tracking and is ad -free. For this, the search engine provider also requires a subscription fee of almost five euros per month from its users.
Jörg Geiger also sees AI chatbots as a breath of fresh air for the search engine market, but the technology is far from mature: “Somehow sources have to be weighted and fact checks have to take place,” says Geiger. Because AI searches did deliver individual answers, but sometimes also freely invented ones.
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