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Two other search engines you might consider are DuckDuckGo (not selling and crunching your data) and Bing (standard with all things Microsoft).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
I'm pretty sure they used to use Google though because you could use the !g modifier and it would display anonymized Google results in the search. Now it just redirects to the Google results page for that query.
Actually, of the two, it's
Bing that's been caught using Google search results to bolster the service :rolleyes: DuckDuckGo has always supported !bangs that let you use them as an intermediary to check other search engines, but AFAIK they've never folded Google's results into their own.
The services they
do use, they don't use all of the time, either - on their web interface you get disclaimers whenever any of their "partner data" is used (and who provided it), but I get the sense that they're relying on that as a fallback, and even then, they pick which of the fallback services has the best results for that particular query.
Hmm strange because I can't find this forum by searching "sff forum" on DuckDuckGo. Maybe it was like that in the past, but I've switched since the beginning of this year and it still shows a lot of difference. It would sound illegal to me to piggyback it like that.
It would be illegal if Google was robbed of their ad revenue, and I bet that's why DuckGoGo does redirects to Google's results page nowadays.
Anyway, as you'd expect, I don't find SFF Forum when searching for it. As Aiboh mentions, though, the only real way to fix that is to have more people link to you organically. And the only way to do
that is to increase traffic and usage.