http://alternativeto.net/ exists for a really long time. It's very sophisticated and has a huge database. I used for years every time I'm searching for an alternative.
> If you don't mind me asking, is the money through the 'promoted' sections sustainable enough for a search engine?
Sustainable to cover the cost of the service? Absolutely, it will do that, but it is not scalable that it would support the needed revenue to be the next Google (or even DDG for that matter).
Committing to privacy and user-center features eliminates a lot of scalable monetization strategies, and I am completely OK with that. I started and continue to work on Runnaroo because I love trying to solve the problem of building a better alternative search engine option.
It’s a good site for getting an overview of possible alternatives to software, and I don’t even know to what extent I’d agree that calling it automated.
I most often use it to get a list of open source alternatives to proprietary software.
Error fetching alternatives
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<h1>We're sorry...</h1><p>... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.</p></div><div style=\"margin-left: 4em;\">See <a href=\"https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/86640\">Google Help</a> for more information.
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Nice interface and idea on how you do this : "When I am exploring alternatives to a product or service, I often to go Google, type "[product] vs ", and just see what it autocompletes. That usually tells me the most popular competitors. If I want to be thorough I'll do the same for the competitors, etc.
This tool just does that automatically for you."[0]
I've been using https://alternativeto.net/ for a few years and have been happy with the crowd-sourced approach,too.
I miss google doing this for us by aggregating collections of useful blogs and articles written by people thoughtfully comparing things, but now google is too busy giving sites like this and all the others ranking, starving actually useful resources of oxygen.
Google provides a REST API for its Suggest feature [1] which can be used for product vs style searches. I use it in a CLI script specifically for this use case.
I don't see the utility of a tool like this that doesn't have editorial input. A list of alternative tools doesn't really tell me what tool would be better for my needs.
Ableton is an alternative to Logic Pro. But only a pro can tell me that Ableton works best as a performance + production tool while Logic is mostly only for production
