What are the highest quality search engines?

cll7793@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 134 points –

It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.

Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.

If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?

EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.

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no mention of kagi yet? Son, I am disappoint.

I'm really happy with Kagi. The fact that I can blacklist certain domains from showing up in search results is chef's kiss.

Back when I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, I found myself occasionally using the !g bang to fall back to Google results. So far I haven't felt the need once in Kagi.

This is like the 18th time I've seen people on Lemmy say good things about kagi, so I just bit the bullet. I like ecosia but I still end up going back to google for some searches, so I'll see how kagi does for me.

I’ve been using it for months and maybe popped back over to Google only a handful of times.

DDG is okay but it’s miserable in comparison. I haven’t tried Ecosia long enough to form a proper opinion but my first impressions weren’t great.

The only people who actively rail against it seem to be the standard group of Fediverse who are… a bit too online 😉

Yeah, since posting that i've been searching random niche things I've attempted with other search engines (like info on obscure instruments and foreign fashion subcultures) and yeah, Kagi is by and large the most useful I've tried. I search for something and it's not just pages of the most normie websites talking about things semi-adjacent to what I searched for, and not an advert in sight! I think I'm in love.

I'm also very happy with kagi. I get search results with no fluff to sort through or scroll past every time I search. It's such a breath of fresh air.

Kagi is also doing some interesting things with search and many, many things that let you customize how the results are presented to you.

Also, intesrtingly, kagi is growing rapidly and as yet they have spent literally zero dollars on advertisements. Purely word of mouth.

I've felt the need a couple times but Google results were always worse.

They are high thinking people will pay $5/mo for search AND being limited to 300 searches/mo. I avoid subscriptions at all cost, so if I were ever to consider paying for search it would need to be a completely forgettable number like .99/mo.

you are still paying for search, you just don't know it (yet).

It's not lost on me, I get it, don't pretend like you're the only one who understands how advertising works on the Internet. That's the agreement with anything you don't directly pay for. The fee that Kago is asking for is unreasonable in my opinion.

sure, we all value things differently. For me this subscription is nothing but a rounding error.

Oh yikes, I have to do a lot of searches as part of my job (software developer). I would be through that quota ridiculously quickly. It looks like they have a $10/month tier one up from there with unlimited searches and some extra features, though.

If you are not paying for it you are not the customer but the product.

Man I sure love Microsoft, they don't treat me like a product since I pay for all their services and Windows, unlike that filth Linux which is full of data harvesting CIA spyware and ads.

I only heard of Kagi in lemmy, very intrigued, however as I lived in third-world country, the price plan is unfeasible for me to consider.

You get the first hundred a month for free.

Maybe you could ration it for when you need high-quality searches?

You get the first hundred a month for free

Thats more rational, I thought it was just the first hundred searches were free.

Due to how important search is, it is not a stable solution to place the trust of the technology, your data privacy, and fair pricing to a corporation. Kagi so far seems great don't get me wrong! But enshitification from monetary incentives almost always occur. Open source search is the only stable long term solution.

Isn't there that whole controversy with kagi going on about transphobia homophobia stuff?

Edit: apparently it was homophobia not transphobia.

Kagi has recently started getting part of its search results from Brave's search index. That's literally all there is to it.

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