Favorite search engines or browsers?

Kyle Judd@lemmy.autism.place to Technology@lemmy.world – 57 points –
48

SearXNG + Librewolf

I tried searx for a while but, at least with the instance I used, the results were awful quality and there were a lot of reliability issues. Do you have an instance recommendation?

I don't have any instance recommendations as I use a variety of instances categorized as vanilla

In the HTML input field:

  • search V for Vanilla instance: all static files comes from the SearXNG git repository.

Afterwards I go into the settings of the chosen instance and make personalized customizations. Once you're done you can save your modifications by copying the:

Search URL of the currently saved preferences

  • which is under the COOKIES Tab

By pasting that link into your Add Search Engine section of your browser of choice, you'll be able to directly search using SearXNG!

Hope this helps improve your searching!🤗

I knew that on Lemmy someone would have commented this before me.

I'm using Zen Browser + DDG, and for mobile I use Fennec! :)

Kagi and Zen works for me

I use Floorp and Startpage. I don't trust DDG after the whole Microsoft debacle. Though, I'm not really that hot on Startpage since they use the same deceptive advertising practices as Google and Bing (disguising ads as results).

Been paying for Kagi for a few months and really like it.

Desktop browser, I bounce around and am never happy. I want to get back on Firefox, and thought I would when the latest version came out and finally added native vertical tab support, but turns out it still doesn't have tab grouping/workspaces (saw that it's in development but haven't seen a timeline) so I've gone back to Vivaldi for now.

Check out Zen Browser

Librewolf on desktop, mull on mobile. Currently using brave search but hoping to eventually switch to searxng

hoping to eventually switch to searxng

Do it! Easily the best search engine I've ever used. I do recommend going through all the settings beforehand, though.

Waterfox. Firefox-based, great theme/userChrome customizations and has the Betterfox config, which is where most of Librewolf's sane defaults come from.

I use Firefox in any graphical environment. It's considerably more customizable than Chrome is, thanks to about:config.

I use Kagi for most searching, though there are a lot of other useful search tools out there for specialized searches, like Tineye for reverse image search.

Ecosia as search engine because I want to support their tree planting.

I don't have favorite browser. I use Firefox for balance of convenience and privacy. It gets the job done.

Browsers: Vivaldi on most desktops, NetSurf on 9front, Vivaldi on mobile, w3m on the command-line.

Search engines: Kagi, Brave.

Whoa, I thought I'd be the only one mentioning Brave. Clearly, I was gravely mistaken.

idk about "favourite", but the ones I use, which are all perfectly adequate for my needs: LibreWolf on desktop, Mull and/or Vanadium on mobile, DDG

I quite liked Kahi when I tried it, but it lacked several Google features that truly make is easier to use. For example on google I can search for a restaurant, and even if it has a common name, it will find the one that is the most relevant to me, and it will also show me a phone number, reviews and pictures etc. I also found that mixed language results are kinda bad, like when searching for something in a language, and then something else in another language, it really prefers having a single language set in the settings. For that, I felt it was a bit expensive for also taking a feature cut. So I went back to google. Luckily in Canada we don't have the AI search summary bullshit yet so there's that.

For example on google I can search for a restaurant, and even if it has a common name, it will find the one that is the most relevant to me,

This is what tracking helps with. Google knows roughly where you live (or exactly where you live if you have your home saved in Google Maps) and uses this data as part of Google search.

One of the main benefits of other search engines is that they don't track you, but as a result, the results aren't customized for you.

Not like they don't have my address: I paid for it with my credit/debit card. They could also make it an opt in feature that customizes the results to be actually more relevant to ME (instead of more relevant to Googles interests). But in the end I still think 10$ a month for a sub par experience is too hard to swallow for me, especially because I found it to load quite a bit slower than Google or duckduckgo. I'm very picky with subscriptions and only subscribe when I feel I am not getting ripped off, like Bitwarden or Proton

I'm using Firefox browser, but might try out Zen Browser, it looks pretty promising and it's non chromium

A shame it's not on Android tho (Only PC)

Duck Duck Go, Brave and Vivaldi. I'm de-firefoxing.

Safari. Use DDG in browser, but primarily use Perplexity for searches via its app.

For now, Brave. As for search engines, most of the time I've been using DDG (IIRC it's the default search engine on Brave) but sometimes I prepend ":g" to use Google for searching things that DDG cannot (yet). As a plus, sometimes I also use Marginalia (I set Brave to use Marginalia when I prepend a ":mgn") in order to search for (g)old content (such as blogosphere content, BBS List archives and so on). If I need to search something deeply, I use Ahmia.