SearXNG - it’s a meta-engine that serves results from a combination of other ones (you can set up which ones you want to use). I like it a lot. Here’s a list of public instances: https://searx.space/
I host my own instance for that added oomph.
I just started using this one and it is crazy how different the experience is
Right? So much better it’s not even funny. It was recommended to me here on Lemmy a while ago, and I couldn’t be happier. Sometimes instances get clogged or go down, but it still beats any other search I tried by a mile.
Agreed
They all kinda suck.
I use DDG since it works without complaining on vpns, but if that doesn’t work I fall back to google, and eventually kagi
Search is really terrible now
It will get much worse as soon as the internet had another 3-4 cycles where it has been digested to train LLMs and puked out again by LLMs to shitty websites. Then you have the option to search for that shit traditionally or to use another shitty LLM on top of that
What is your beef with Kagi? I’ve found it pretty useful
You have to login, so it isn’t very privacy respecting.
I pay with a crypto account and a dedicated email account. In this world you make your own privacy, everyone is out to get your info. Yes, they track my search trends and likely don’t do anything too nefarious with it now, but it’s only a matter of time before they do, but my trends in that account is all they will get and since there are no ads and I can play a part in content filtering and prioritization on Kagi, I am far less a victim than many other platforms.
Just because it’s a dedicated email account doesn’t mean it’s not traceable to you.
Kagi
They’re all crap because they all track you, but I stick with DuckDuckGo because I find their lies about not tracking me to be comforting enough
Yeah wait, how do they make money
Ads
My own self-hosted SearXNG.
How does that work, does it go out and start indexing the internet for you?
It’s a meta search engine. It queries other search engines and compiles you results.
That’s a shame, It would be more interesting to run your own crawlers.
(Yes I realise that would be computationally intense and hard, but it would nonetheless be cool)
There is probably a neat wget oneliner that could crawl everything on the open web. The real challenge is how to index all the information. That might be a neat Perl oneliner.
Mostly using DDG now for sometime. Once in a while need to use Google.
I’ve found for the last 3-4 years I haven’t had to fall back to Google. DDG results have been good enough I can use it full time.
In my case I’ve found the need to use Google for local searches, and certain very specific searches (one example is journal impact factors). In a lot of other cases, DDG has actually given me better results - I was getting fed up with some of the crappy results I was getting using Google, which prompted me to try out and eventually shift to DDG.
Altavista
Hotbot
Dogpile
AskJeeves should be rebooted with a LLM
Magellan
I’m using Qwant. Works better for me than DuckDuckGo.
Another Qwant person! I’m enjoying it.
People here need to try Qwant. It’s refreshing how clean it is and I think the search results are pretty good
Qwant isn’t available in a lot of countries though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant
Thanks for pointing this out! I finally have the reason to use the mullvad per site proxy settings.
DDG, but ever so often I have to use bangs to Google or some dedicated sites. Been trying out my own instance of the SearchX meta search engine but honestly it’s not that much of a difference except it lags. I’ve been using ChatGPT way more for direct questions instead of using search words and sifting through the results, with the risk of hallucination so still need to double check on important stuff. Copilot sort of works but I don’t know why I’m not comfortable with it. Too bad Gemeni seems to be a dud so far. I’d love to see a FOSS language model that can be tweaked for personal interests and custom commands for external APIs and that gives references to the answers.
DDG for me, but mostly I use !wi and !gh. Pretty rare to do a rawdog search
DDG for everyday browsing and Kagi’s free trial for more “difficult” searches.
I’m not sure how many Kagi searches I have left but I’m most likely buying the unlimited plan when I run out.
Ecosia. I don’t like their links to Microsoft but I think the environment is more important than anything these days.
Where, sadly, „search engine“ essentially means „Bing frontend“ these days …
