What search engine do you recommend that isn't Google or Bing?

vermyndax@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 144 points –

I'm still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don't trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What's the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?

Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a "default search engine" that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.

Edit 2: Thanks for the recommendation of Kagi. I'm going to roll with it for a while. I see they have an extension for Safari that allows them to hijack the address bar, which is just what I needed.

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I just make a post in NoStupidQuestions and use y'all like a search engine. :P

I post answers to NoStupidQuestions with most of the keywords you're looking for and a link to my AI-generated blog. Your move.

I'm out of the loop on DDG, what did they do?

Not sure on the shady part, but I have stopped using them simply because they give me the same crap as Bing. Web search is almost dead, I’ve been thinking of trying one of the paid options. I’ve read good things about kagi

i don't get this, i get perfectly fine search results with ddg..

i get finding the results slightly worse but dead? stop it with this absurd hyperbole

Depends what you're trying to do. Looking up a movie? Easy. Looking up niche documentation/issues or error codes just feels hopeless compared to how it used to be.

i mean i have no real issues finding info about various linux errors, is that not niche enough?

or have i just never seen the glory days where a google search would automatically fix your issue and bake a nice cake?

Free web search gives me a whole page of SEO pages, cached reddit content that’s been deleted when you click it, or one of like five tech giants and their crap.

Unless you are very specific and already know what site you are looking for it is extremely difficult to simply find information now, if you just want an answer you locate the relevant reddit or discord community and try your luck there, or ask a LLM to give you an answer because you can’t wade through the sheer amount of non- and disinformation out there now.

Of course, the LLM is also trained on this bullshit and not actually smart, so at best you get an idea where you can look for the information it regurgitated if you make it cite its sources, and do your own research from there.

Are you really telling me this is somehow not much much worse than mid 2000s-2010s internet, where you typed something into google and it almost always found that exact thing you were looking for?

Surely anecdotal, but I have never clicked on a Google Reddit link that didn’t let me to an actual post, most of the time with the actual info I was hoping to find and never have I been served SEO pages.

There was a slight influx of AI generated nonsense a couple months back but that stopped. On my iPhone i Use DuckDuckGo and an perfectly happy. On the Mac where I have more ways to block stuff I use google and also don’t have any issues.

May I ask what kind of things you usually search for?

[Edited by the commenter to remove incorrect information, see below.] I'm not sure if anything else has come up since then though, and I've continued using DDG, just not for any sort of news or information on current events. I mainly use a search engine for dev stuff anyways.

Apart from that, the results are often pretty terrible unless you use the exact terms from whatever page you're trying to find. I've also seen a lot of people stating that search results keep changing every time they refresh the page as well.

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A long ago they had drama for apparently leaking user information to microsoft— but that was a while ago. Really they were accused of having biased results.

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DuckDuckGo on Firefox. If you truly want to de-google your life avoid Chrome and Chromium based browsers like Edge and Brave

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https://kagi.com no ads, great results. It’s $5 a month but worth it imo

I need to try it out. If it's as good as its reputation implies and stays that way, I'd be $5/mo amount of interested. But I have no idea how many times I'm going to need to search for something per month. Not a fan of that limitation.

It's really good. The price tag is worth it imo as they buy results from a host of other search engines including Google, but the results are actually better.

Firefox allowed you to define the default search and have many many engines listed. That's been a standard feature for many years.

even simpler – Firefox will auto-detect a lot of search engines – right-click in the search/address bar and if Firefox can detect it, bottom option will be to add that engine to your list

I'm pretty sure most browsers can. Pretty sure OP's complaint's a big misplaced on that one.

All of them do allow it, but not all of them make it simple. There are times it will change the search in the address bar but not everywhere else in the browser as well. Of the web browsers I use, Firefox is the most friendly to change.

Half a dozen people in here already mentioned it, but Kagi has completely changed the search game and changed the way I use the Internet. It's like an old school search engine with modern conveniences like a chat bot and summarizer, but without the ads and other shenanigans.

Ugh, paid. In this economy!?

It's either your wallet or your personal information...

A surprisingly and insanely expensive to run and manage a search engine that isn't just a reskin on bing (DDG). Even more so when you can't mine your users for data.

Kagei is doing really good stuff and the quality of results I get are much higher. The $10/m is it easily paid off within even a day or two's use in my normal job. Never mind all the personal research that I do.

Is a different model that is a not providing you with the best results that you are looking for. As opposed to steering you towards ads or towards partnerships. I like it.

I totally get the sentiment of saying when you pay you are not the product, however... what does any company stop from still collecting data anyway? I know that the kagi people deny that but why should anyone trust that.

Companies have fucked customers/consumers over so much, there is no trusting anyone when it comes to data collection. It is just so easy. Even if they don't use it right now, why not just collect it anyway.

So, while I'd love to pay a little bit to support a service like that, I am so jaded by how dishonest companies have been about stuff like that, that I am not really willing to also give them money in addition.

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I know, that was my reaction at first too. But I tried it for a month and honestly it's an amazing search engine. If it helps you to know, when you search they also use the (paid) search APIs of other search engines and aggregate the results in a way to get something better than any individual engine - so your searches actually have a decent marginal cost for them.

$5/month. Worth it.

except it's not for me... I search way, way more than 300/month and $10/m honestly sounds a little unreasonable for a search engine.

Cool, don't use it then. Enjoy your SEO optimised search results

For the huge majority of people, $5 and 300 searches is plenty, and great value for actually useful results

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I personally enjoy DDG. Their privacy policy for their search is straightforward and there's no evidence that they're not abiding by it. I find it tends to prioritize higher quality blogs and articles ahead of social media results.

I sometime use Brave Search as it seems to do better at giving social media/forum results as they seem to be prioritized higher by it, when I'm looking for more discussion-based content.

+1 for DDG, but i dont get it why some comments here said it is just bing

I've been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding "deep" results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don't at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.

Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I'll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don't want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.

Kagi is by far the best search engine I've ever used. It is paid though.

I've been paying for it for a couple of months now, am pretty happy with it. Feels weird to be paying for a search engine, and as it still only has a finite number of searches every month I still have to get used to not being reluctant to use it, but its results are indeed great. More focused than DuckDuckGo, less bullshit than Google.

Are you sure? I had been paying for a higher tier, but I remember they sent an email that they were changing or removing the search metering a while ago.

In US it's $5 for 300 searches or $10 for unlimited.

Unless they changed something very subtly and very recently, there's a cap on searches on the lower tier and unlimited search on the higher one.

You're right. It's $5 for 300 searches or $10 for unlimited. It used to cost more and still have a limit. I didn't realize there was still a cheaper tier.

I use SearXNG. It is a meta search engine so it use results from various other search engines and you can specify which with !. It does the job for me.

My favourite feature is that you can host it yourself, you can even set it up to search over tor or VPN if you're super privacy conscious.

I was a bit wary when I first spun up an instance, but it’s very low maintenance and mostly just works.

Does it choke in some edge cases? Yeah, but far less often than I had expected. For my own use case it’s low resource and does exactly what it says on the tin - nothing more, nothing less.

It’s my default across a variety of devices, and is perfectly happy behind basic auth and a minimal nginx conf.

Occasionally I’ve even surfaced some oddball results that give me unexpected perspective on a topic.

Honestly I feel like searxng is way better than it gets credit for. It clearly isn’t as powerful as google but it isn’t drowning in SEO crap so that difference is entirely negated and then some.

Kagi. Nothing else even comes close. Kagi is what Google used to be, before they decided they'll show you whatever is profitable, rather than what they know you're looking for.

The best I've found is Mojeek. The results take some getting used to because we're all used to Google's fuckery, but I've been using it for months, and it's quite good.

There's also SearXNG, though I'm not sure if that fits your needs. A couple public instances I've liked are:

https://searx.tiekoetter.com/

https://search.fuckoffgoogle.net/

I really enjoy Mojeek. It gives you results you would not get anywhere else. I see high value in that

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Kagi.com

Duckduckgo if you use a vpn, everyone else throws speedbumos at VPN users... Prove your a human...

Been using Qwant for maybe a year or so. Recently found Swisscows too. I am not sure if Qwant uses their own index. I remember that they said that they were to create their own index, but the results looks suspiciously similar to Bing. Swisscows for sure runs their own index, and I find the results to be rather good

Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a “default search engine” that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.

Which browsers don't? I think this one can likely be chalked up to user error.

ecosia, like knowing that my searchs are helping the world a little

Another option is SearXNG. It's meta search engine, which means that it aggregates other search engines like Google and Bing but without tracking or logging, because your searches are proxied using a public instance, that will mix your search with the ones from other people.

And about default search engine, don't know what you're talking about, both chrome and Firefox allows this, in mobile and desktop.

https://searx.space/

Marginalia is cool. It feels like an old-school search engine and truly provides results you don't see through Google, et al.

startpage is alright if u want a quick alternative.

but definitely look into searx. it can be annoying to choose an instance (unless you self host!), but it can be a lot more customizable and decentralized

I used to be a part of the DuckDuckGo hype train until I found out they did actually track data (not an issue to me personally, but it betrayed their key marketing point), as used to be demonstrable if you had a slow internet and hovered your cursor over a link (it would show the tracking data loading). It was the one thing separating them from Ecosia, and I decided to join the Ecosia hype train, even if their own promises are themselves highly exaggerated. Every effort to do what Ecosia promises, even failed efforts, are appreciable.

I run a whoogle instance personally

How is an instance a search engine?

Whoogle is a self hosted front end for google. You just run it and it will pass the search to Google and strip all the bullshit out.

I am generally switching between Google and duck duck go on Firefox. When Google gives shitty results (which is frequently) I switch over to ddg.

I use a mix of all 3 search engines on firefox

Kagi if you're willing to pay. Otherwise tryaS Searx instance.

You can absolutely configure the default search engine on your browser to a custom one in some cases. I use startpage and it isn’t in the default options, but it can be added.

How would you go about setting searxng for search suggestions? I'm not sure i understand the documentation.

I've been using qwant for a few weeks and it gives me quite satisfying and accurate results. Before I had been using ecosia for years but the results can be lackluster sometimes. Especially when you search very specific "niche" things (like obscure Linux problems troubleshooting). But I'm still looking for a browser which let's you pick multiple languages for results.

You want a free search, Brave. Don't like brave, then qwant. I use Kagi. It costs money but it is great.

Brave search is also really good now

Brave statement

Ican only speak of my own experience. Finding what I'm looking for and not having to deal with the insane amount of ads on google and the likes is worth it to me to make a recommendation.

People aren't downgotinf because you're right or wrong, but because Brave is homophobic.

brave is pretty widely disliked by people (including me) for it's CEO's homophobia. That's probably why you're being down voted.

I use startpage.com on desktop. They provide Google results (sort of like DDG uses Bing results) so it’s not some autonomous magic privacy thing but it’s what I want from a search engine.

It reminds me of Google pre-enshittification.

https://www.startpage.com/

Owned now by a marketing company. I've been using it for many years and never had my results noticeable affect my advertising incoming.

It's a proxy for Google which is why I use it. I have really started to use ChatGPT in anger yet as the trivial don't need it.

I'm not connected to them in any way.