You cant even avoid irrelevant results with "site:" anymore

rosenjcb@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 456 points –
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There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you'd see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they're still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)

It'd be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the "top" results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).

You might be interested in SearXNG: https://docs.searxng.org/

Edit: spelling

I JUST started using SearXNG and have been also googling the same terms to see how they compare.

So far (less than a week), SearXNG has had what i was looking for in the first 5 links every time. Googled result was either below the scroll or I gave up. Maybe only a couple dozen tests, but it wasn't even close.

I think Hotbot did that back in the 90's, and it's relaunched (well, the name and domain have been put to use again) as a privacy focused search that combines an AI style question/answer style system as well as traditional link list result. https://www.hotbot.com

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're right. I think before that was metasearch.com. It was basically a top frame that you entered the search in with a row of icons, and the bottom frame would render the search results from whichever sites you chose. I'm pretty sure it removed all the extra elements, too, so it was actually pretty decent.

Wow, I miss Dogpile! It was my go-to search engine in grad school (along with Altavista and Ask)

Dogpile is still around, and it's still a meta search engine.