Someone over on Ask MetaFilter asked about paid search engines, and the hive mind, being the helpful hive mind that they are, also suggested various free alternatives to Google Search.
One of the recommendations was for Lycos:
I was shocked recently to learn that not only is Lycos still a thing, it seams to be actually search-y, and has led to a number of interesting discoveries about technologies I've been working with.
So I figured I'd take a look.
It's been many years since I used Lycos, and I was curious how it would compare to Google.
One immediately noticeable difference is that Lycos doesn't tell you how many results it found. The number of results reported by Google is helpful, and I miss that on Lycos.
I also discovered that, like Google, it often returns results that don't match everything you search for; unlike with Google, it's a little harder to tell until you click through to the linked page, because Lycos doesn't highlight the matching terms in the snippet they show.
So, when I searched for "penn jillette" ephemera, I found four entries in the first page of 10 that looked promising, but only two of them contained a word like "ephemera" (one had "ephemera," one had "ephemeral").
And - when I put quotes around "ephemera" to require that word, I got a bunch of stuff with very little relation to Penn Jillette - although his name did appear on all the pages listed in the results. So - less relevance, but more exact matches.
A second search, for samui tsumetai (two different Japanese words for "cold"), I got similar results to a Google search, and I'm curious what I would find if I did a close comparison of the listed sites.
Finally, when I tried "houses" "forever" "alan yang", I got noticeably worse results in Lycos - and they didn't get any better when I tried swapping in locations for "houses". The results were much more about Alan Yang and his various series (including Master of None), with little information about the locations where the shot was shot.
I'll probably keep trying Lycos; it seems like it provides some useful alternatives sometimes. It's certainly not perfect, but it is intriguing.