What are the highest quality search engines?

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 193 points – 5 months ago

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.

Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
Yandex: https://yandex.com/

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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I find all the kagi mentions to be very suspicious

It’s not, really, I switched from Google some years ago and had accepted my faith with DuckDuckGo, but then tried out Kagi. I use search so much daily for work, the relief of getting quality results again is immense and probably saves me hours per week. I get much better results from Kagi than I got at the end from Google, and I can tune them to my liking:

block Pinterest results when I search for images,
downprioritize shopping results,
rewrite all Reddit links to go to old.reddit.com,
unamp google AMP links
summarize long texts / documents
quick answer from the top 5 results

..and so on and so on. It’s just so effective.

… suspicious

You can redirect old reddit with the tampermonkey extension

https://greasyfork.org/scripts/44669

I always fear it comes across that way when I recommend it to people here. I’m just a very happy user and want to see them succeed.

I find it expensive for what it is (given that I still get a limited number of searches) and I'm not comfortable with some of their ways (I don't want anything to do with AI, and I the idea they have of being nonpolitical seems dangerously naive to me). I also don't like supporting non-FOSS projects all that much.

Still, it's the best search I've found, and I'm paying every month until I find something better. It's worth it.

If I had stock/investments in a search engine, you better fucking believe Id also have a bunch of bots crawling for the terms "What is the best search engine" and immediately hijack the convo with bots upvoting my search engine.

I cannot explain how easy it is to do this.

Your comment belongs higher. When given the opportunity to make money by social media advertising sometimes in the thousands or millions, companies, share holders, and conflict of interest groups take it. Cablemod's burning adapters, cryptocurrency scams, payed positive youtube reviews are some great examples. In general there is no honor system and its best to assume anything that can be abused will.

Also manipulating votes is incredibly effective towards swaying public opinion due to the bandwagon effect. Spend a days worth of effort making fake accounts and downvoting any opinion you see as undesirable and most people will follow suit. This is especially bad in echo chambers like on twitter, reddit, etc.

I wish a broader audience could be aware of this. The best I can do is try to spread the word.

Sources:

The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc
Cablemod Recall: https://old.reddit.com/r/cablemod/comments/18o7bnv/planned_voluntary_safety_recall_of_cablemod/
FTX Scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX
Bandwagon Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
Echo Chamber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

same. specially considering how privacy invasive kagi is.

How is it privacy invasive?

How is it privacy invasive? For example, compared to competition like Google?

copypasting the other comment I made in this thread:

and am I supposed to believe such a bold claim? the only reason they give is "trust me, bro. I pinky promise I'm not logging anything".

You have one account, every search query you make is associated with that account. And even if they aren't selling that ultra sensitive data, I'm sure they are keeping logs to prevent abuse and fix bugs which could be used when a third party gains access to their servers (malicious actors, law enforcement, etc).

And that's assuming that Kagi is not mining and or selling any data themselves, which is a bold assumption given how little we know about their proprietary product. If at least they published the source code, but no. I'm supposed to trust a proprietary black box which could potentially be linking every search query back to me.

I don’t have any skin in this game. I just wanted to point out that you went from “given how privacy invasive this particular entity is”

“… assuming… how little we know… could potentially”

That’s a pretty big leap from a bold and confident assertion that an entity is doing something all the way to saying that entity maybe could be doing something but we don’t know. It’s just a weird logical leap to me, and I felt compelled to mention it.

I'm glad I'm finally not the only one feeling this way. I've been seeing them aggressively pushed seemingly out of the blue for months now. Especially for what is such an awful deal and zero evidence to their claims, just citing the marketing page at face value.

I've mentioned it a few times because it's actually good.

Why? It's a great search engine that a lot of people find extremely useful.