Since Internet search has and will change, which search engines do you use successfully, and what are their advantages?
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I use DuckDuckGo, I forgot how to live without the search tags such as !yt, !fb, !w to search specific sites.
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).
Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called “Lens”, which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I’ve defined - see image.Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
(copied from another thread I replied to)
Interesting. I just searched some topics related to a paper I’m working on and found some good resources which I haven’t seen on Google yet. Really interesting.
Also, TIL about URL rewrites! Now all of my search results use private frontends. Thanks for the tip!
I use you.com as it’s centered on an ai chatbot and pulls in traditional web search results to augment it’s answers. it works quite well.
Interesting, is that the only search engine you use? Does it work well when you want to browse different links?
yeah for most of my searches it’s all I need. you.com adds traditional search results in the sidebar if you need them. I do use !g (google) in some cases (usually for a niche specific page I need).
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I use a searxng instance as-well, one I can host myself. Besides the cool factor of hosting your own personal search engine you can tweak the setting a on a server level as you wish and you know the machine your queries are going to.
When I want to try something AI related I use the Bing AI though, it can pull from multiple search results when giving an answer which is cool.
I have to shout out Wiby. It is focused on like weird personal websites from the early 2000s, that kind of thing. Absolutely not a general-purpose search engine, but mashing the “surprise me” button will take you to all sorts of fun places.
In the same vain, there’s marginalia search.
Stumbleupon is back, baby!
I’m just hitting ‘surprise me’ and having a blast.
Kagi.com no ads, private, you pay a subscription so they look for your interest instead of you being the product, has many customizations, very responsive company, very good use of AI, super fast, doesn’t require javascript, and many other things, just give it a try
What paid plan do you use ? If it’s not the ultimate plan, do you often go over the “limit” ? I’m interested, but I have a hard time knowing what plan I will actually require.
I’m also on the early adopter unlimited plan. What I suggest is that you take a conservative plan and observe your behavior, you can always upgrade to a bigger plan later
Not OP, but as a data point, I do approximately 2000-2500 searches per month. I’m obviously on the unlimited plan (an early adopter version of it). I’m in software development so I search a lot.
Thank you for the information :-)
I have switched to Ecosia few days ago. No conplains so far. Its free, and builds off Bing IIRC.
I have been intrigued by Kagi, but Im not really ready to pay a sub for a search engine.
Duck-Duck-Go. Getting worse for privacy (allegedly) but it’s been overall great for me. If I can’t find what I’m searching for on the first page or two I just add a
!gto the front to search an anonymized google for that query.might not count, but I use startpage, which uses google while allegedly keeping none of the info that makes google problematic
sometimes i use duckduckgo,in firefox you can make a shortcut to type anything in any searchbar too, like so: (in this example I’ll use kbin.social search)
We type something into search to get the exact url we need, that ends up being https://kbin.social/search?q=[something] in this case
[something] is obviously what we typed, so we save a bookmark of https://kbin.social/search?q=%s where %s swaps out what we type when we refer to the bookmark
Then we give the bookmark a keyword that makes it easy to type, so like, kI use this for youtube, arch wiki, the type-effectiveness graph on bulbapedia pages ( https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/%s_(Pok%C3%A9mon)#Type_effectiveness ), etc, etc
Startpage, google search results without ads, trackers but much slower, the slowness can get annoying sometimes when my internet speed is bad
Honestly? Bing chat has been quite good to me if I have specific questions. It searches the web and gives me a summary.
Unfortunately, still Google, with Bing a distant second. I’ve realised at least half of my searches are locale-specific, and engines like DDG are so American-centric. This is even with letting DDG use accurate location data. Reading the options here and hoping to find something I’ve not heard before that’ll work and hopefully replace Google as my main search engine.
If you are in Europe, Qwant is a decent alternative. There are also alternatives like Ecosia and Startpage that use Google or Bing behind the scenes but limit how much they can track you.
I use DuckDuckGo and it workw quite well and at least they say they protect your privacy (I am sure they do a better job than GAFAM/BigTech spyware mafia), but am looking for something better since I found out it has some agreement with Microsoft and I do not trust those spyware-producing convicted monopoly abusers at all.
Been using DDG almost exclusively (still need google occasionally) but noticed the quality on DDG has been decreasing with the ride of generative content. Anything travel or review related is just garbage.
