@mangeurdenuage Is # really that pervasive? # got to be so big because its results were better than existing search providers. Yahoo used to be close (even with a Bing backend) and # was even closer (with Bing, #, and others), but lately, using a non-G search results in just going back to G.
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The deep secret among search providers is that the "B" in # stands for "broken". Despite 20+ years of Microsoft pouring money into search, its results are usually comparable in their awfulness with #
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# & # can get decent results when they're set to use Google as their provider, but if an instance gets popular, it will hit its API limit.