What are the highest quality search engines?
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.
I find all the kagi mentions to be very suspicious
Itās 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:
..and so on and so on. Itās just so effective.
ā¦ 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. Iām 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:
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 donāt have any skin in this game. I just wanted to point out that you went from āgiven how privacy invasive this particular entity isā
To
āā¦ assumingā¦ how little we knowā¦ could potentiallyā
Thatās 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 donāt know. Itās 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.
Technically the best one was Altavista.
But they are long gone because they came from the old academic & idealistic internet and they never learned to survive in that internet where money rules.
From a very old memory, Google blew AltaVista out of the water no?
I mean we all switched for a reason and it wasnāt the cute logo.
I believe yahoo killed altvista before google came and finished it off
Altavista was ahead of their time. The modern internet desperately needs a technical search engine.
Many people keep asserting that DuckDuckGo is as useless as Google, but I havenāt had a single issue with it. Could it be a regional thing?
DDG is ok for most searches, but they have definitely hit a plateau. Programming search results are quite poor, for instance.
Iāve started paying for kagi. Their results are just way better at this point.
I don't live in the US and the regional results for my country are worse on DuckDuckGo than on Google.
But still, I noticed Google's quality drastically falling down in recent years.
It is as useless. After all, it's just Bing. But if the results are good enough for you, then why bother finding something else.
Some results come from Bing.
most are. just do a side by side comparison. for most queries it's literally the same results.
Hmm, I did notice a sudden severe drop in quality recently. Perhaps they are A/B testing something.
ddg has been going downhill for awhile now. they changed something significant a couple years back that just made results, especially after the first half-page, absolute shit.
I think it was because they dropped Yandex results.
Ddg cannot filter out results. If you don't want pages containing the term, term you add -term to your search and those results should not be included.
Ddg doesn't do this. I did a brief test of many search engines, and only google and mojeek filtered results correctly.
Edit: yadex seems to have working filtering.
Google doesn't do that properly anymore, either, much like the "literal search" (quotes) - used to work, now it's a crap shoot.
It's not as bad as Google yet, but I find myself getting terrible or no results quite a few times.
Ex: if I'm looking for a niche blog post from example.com, just entering the keywords doesn't return the right result, if anything at all. I have to add "site:example.com" and the right link shows up on top.
It's kinda amusing when this happens, but I keep using ddg anyway because bing and Google had the same issue for the same keywords when I ran into the issue.
I self-host a SearXNG instance and it works really well.
https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker
Correct answer
Why pay for a search engine? Iām getting tired of Kagi astroturfing
Thank you!
Ooo this looks super interesting
Here are some options I use in my rotation.
Brave Search (skip the browser)
Mojeek
Qwant (French)
Yandex (Russian)
Mullvad Leta (Mullvad VPN subscription required)
MetaGer (German meta search)
Startpage (Private Google results)
DuckDuckGo (Private Bing results)
SearXNG and similar self hosted options are awesome, but Iāve found them unreliable.
Be skeptical of Kagiā¦ Itās promoted pretty heavily around here for something thatās not FOSS.
I'm convinced at this point that Kagi is astroturfing on Lemmy, it's unnatural. All they do is just cite the marketing page when questioned about the quality, or as to why they supposedly think it's worth paying for compared to much more mature as-driven services that do respect your privacy.
I think you meant to write ass-driven
I've been using Kagi for 3 months now I think? And I've found it to be extremely useful for research...to a point, my only real issue is that after the first or so series of results it either doesn't offer anything further or just no longer is showing relevant results to my search. Honestly though I've been very happy with Kagi and continue to pay the 10/month but if I do find something even better I'd happily switch. I'm not married to any particular search engine (well ....least not to the extent of using Google services).
If you're skeptical just give it a try I think they have a trial system in place.
THANK YOU for mentioning startpage! I have not heard of them but I haven't liked using DDG very much so I've begrudgingly using google in private mode (and then I always forget to switch back and forth)
Took wayyy to long to find something not recommending Kagi.
Yandex was way better for searches in russian sources, but it came to shit just like google and also excludes whatever russian government don't like at that point. I searched for some software in it multiple timea and the first link was some noname, probably malware site. It also promotes it's own malware like browser with questionable russian security sertificates and their own Alexa. I'd honestly not include it in any list.
I like DDG and don't switch from it that much. I've also heard Kagi as paid search engine is good, but I've never tried it.
I've found duckduckgo works fine for things that aren't recent.
Controversially the bing gpt chat bot works alarming well.
The bing chat bot scares me a bit. I don't want to use bing out of principle, but at this point they're just flirting too damn hard.
DDG is just Bing, so ...
Are you a bot?
Are you?
Haha I wish, it's just your response seems like you didn't read the message.
My point is that you were talking solely about Bing.
I self host a searxng instance and I find the combination of bing, duckduckgo and qwant as the source engines to return decent results. You can use a public instance and choose those engines in settings.
I found public instances often have issues connecting to many search engines at once, will look into self hosting it. Thanks!
I'm specifically looking to replace DDG, they have really dropped in quality lately and are very clearly going back on their word for not having you in a bubble with specific to you results.
This site collects quite a few web search engines: https://www.searchenginemap.com/
For everyone who uses searxng, is it great for day to day browsing? Do I require to host my own instance or the setup is as easy as requiring to add "searxng" option on my browser app?
I'm interested to move away from google as it becomes shitty everyday and loses its effectiveness for advanced query (based on my own result compared during 2013 up to pre covid). Bing have weird result on my region so cannot use it, ddg only for occasional use.
Thanks!
pick a host from searx.space
Might be a good idea to bookmark this too because sometimes some hosts go down.
Appreciate it, will read more in documentations šš½
Is "super SEO sites" a catch all term for those 99% filler websites that have a tomato soup recipe (in theory) but actually start out with, "Historical evidence seems to suggest that the tomato was first cultivated in the territory that would eventually become Guam back in 1464..."
I've wondered if we had a common reference term for those? I wish it didn't have a positive connotation though...
Those plus sites that are lists of buzz words that have nothing to do with the actual site.
Come on over to Kagi! You do have to pay but I use a search engine dozens of times per day so Iām not too bothered by it.
I've heard a lot of great things about Kagi, though the search limit and subscription is a little off-putting. A self-hosted Kagi would be amazing though!
Kagi has a free trial, 100 searches for free, so you can try it out and see if you like it or not.
Why would they do all that work to create a better search engine than Google and give it away for free? What is going to pay their bills?
Google pays their bills by selling your data and spying on your searches, not to mention they are morally corrupt. Kagi pays their bills with your monthly sub. Seems a lot better.
I'm worried eventually even Kagi will get enshittified. It has been a common trend that almost always occurs. Open source is the only way to ensure stability. Conflict of interest is what leads to companies either overcharging, or even accepting to get bought out.
Don't get me wrong, Kagi seems to be a great company thus far! But for something as important as search it would be best to have an open source solution.
Probably they will, but it could take a long time. Valve is still good as an example of a company that managed to not become crap.
Open source is the only way to provide stability? Can you explain more about this?
Valve is great! Private and non-profit organizations give me some hope for a better internet one day.
Regarding Kagi, there are other potential concerns with privacy, data leaks and price gouging as well. The Patriot Act and Snowden's leaks have shown that companies will lie in their privacy policy to appeal to authorities even if they claim they are not storing information. All your health related searches, sensitive personal details, private life, etc is also always linked to your payment method waiting for a potential data leak if they are lying. (Or a copy is just sent to five eyes)
All that is to say, be wary of trusting your privacy to companies. Monetization is a powerful motivator!
You can pay with bitcoin, which might help keeping the account entirely anonymous for some.
After that power company got blackmailed in the American South and extorted for like 40000 Bitcoin, which they paid...but then within 24 hours the FBI had recovered all of it...which is something no one was supposed to be capable of doing, I'm going to go ahead and say Bitcoin anonymity is compromised.
That means the FBI or DHS has devoted the computational power necessary to track every.single.bitcoin.transaction and then indexed it all well enough to cross reference against metadata.
Bitcoin is as secure as they allow it to be. It's most likely allowed for the same reason the Tor network is, because it's an avenue to move resources or information to undercover assets overseas.
At this point, I've come to expect that all of the products I like are going to be ruined at some point, so it's about establishing enough independence to more easily transition to the next service.
Kagi's great, and I'll worry about finding a better search engine once it gets worse, but I don't expect that to happen before my next renewal, so I'm happy.
Self hosting is smart! Usually good things always come to an end, at least if they are not open sourced.
Plus self hosting an index big enough and fast enough for a useful search engine is ridiculous.
They now have unlimited searches for $10/mo. Thatās what got me to try it out.
You are correct though. I really do not like having all of my search history tied to my credit card (and then me). What helps me justify that is that instead of me being the product like google, by paying Iāve become the customer. Hopefully that incentivizes keeping them on the up and up.
I did come across searnxg in this thread. It looks like that can be self hosted so Iām gonna give that a try as well.
That's expensive as shit, what the hell.
Yeah, you may be fine with the $5 plan, but thatās the lowest tier available.
Afaik they are not really running a profit yet, just expanding, so thatās an eye opener to how expensive it is to run a search business and how much value Google and others estimate they get from your personal information.
For now though their user base seems fairly much leaning towards business users that can defend this expense as part of becoming more effective professionally. Hopefully over time theyāll grow large enough to provide cheaper plans for regular persons while staying privacy focused and ad free.
I did 1300 queries which I think would put it at .007 cents per query. Sounds reasonable to me.
Not when they collaborate with brave. Fuck that!
They donāt ācollaborateā with Brave, just use its search API.
The owner of Kagi is a homophobic piece of shit.
Just use searxng.
If you are going to look for perfect companies, you will look forever, and probably use Google while you are looking.
It's not worth it. Just use something better than Google even if it's flawed, because everything had flaws.
Donāt give money to homophobes, we have an open source and better alternative already.
Kagi isnāt homophobic. Apparently the "controversy" is that it employs brave search as well; which is indeed made by a company with a homophobic ceo.
Though by that logic virtually everyone in the world is. Because at some point in time, in some place, someone built a piece of modern civilization upon knowledge or resources belonging to a homophobic person, Iām fairly sure.
No, thatās a seperate controversy. The Kagis owners views became talked about a lot more during that event though.
So many people here are quick to defend and normalise homophobia, yet refuses to just use an open source free alternative thatās without this baggage.
Can you link to some evidence?
Are you sure none of the developers of the open source free alternative aren't homophobic, transphobic, or in some other way bad people?
I think it's perfectly understandable that some people are homophobes, so it doesn't worry me. You still have people being afraid of black people in this age even.
You can dislike that of course, but that's the real world. You can walk up to any older person and they are likely to be a lot less open to gay marriage than a younger person also.
You interpret that as them being hostile. I think it's more about being afraid of something that doesn't feel natural to them.
No it's not. It's not a justifiable position. It's not unexpected sadly, but it is not understandable because it's not a position based on anything other than ingrained hatred and fear
Yeah, get fucked mate :)
Where did you get that from?
Itās all over the Mastodon side of the Fediverse, shouldnāt be too hard to find with a quick search. Iām not at my pc atm so cbf using a phone to find some links sorry.
The controversy was about Kagi using search API from Brave, whose CEO is supposedly homophobic. Not Kagiās CEO himself being homophobic.
No, it is also the Kagi founder as per the Mastodon topics.
Can you show some evidence of that?
The sources I find are solely from mastodon threads, and date from this month and the Brave thing. This is the best thing I've found
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111707573907442638
So Kagiās founder not wanting his company policy to be influenced by the personal beliefs of the CEO of a different company is somehow āhomophobicā?
According to some people on the fediverse, the Kagi forum thread that is linked in the toots I posted above and seemingly nowhere else.
From a non political standpoint: I tried Kagi last year and it was ok but I didn't get the big deal. And because I'm not in the US but the UK if you try searching where's my nearest garage or stay the nearest result came up as 150 miles away. So it's one of those things I'll maybe return to it once it's developed a bit more
Kagi is the highest quality for sure. There isn't a better one, I have tried all of them except perplexity, and that's more like chat gpt rather than search.
Even though there's a small monthly cost, the results have been consistent for Kagi. But consistency meets only half of my needs for search: I also want to make decisions quickly from what I find within the contents. If I were to to go to a link, wait for it to load, scroll the content, etc. -- does that listed forum post have the answer I am looking for? Does this news article cover the nuances I have been tracking and would like to read more of? Kagi offers an AI-based summarize feature that helps. And that's been meeting the other half of my needs, as well.
EDIT, an opinion: Search services may well be eventually replaced by small, niche LLMs trained to perform summerization tasks, such as Consensus, which I have used for work research, and Perplexity.ai. The AI summarize feature of Kagi is why I see the service as more useful than straight indexes, even when self-hosted. Kagi is a stepping stone toward this for me, and why I recommend it.
Lol kagi bots spotted!
Beep boop, my dude.
Please solve the partial differential equation to continue watching the video:
"I am not a robot" captcha is getting too hard...": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru6fi4O4lp4
How WOULD you differentiate bots from happy users, anyway? They certainly look like organic accounts to me
A 7 months old random fediverse account is a bot? You know that the entirety of the fediverse is like 0.001 percent of the user base of the social media giants?
That would be money really badly spent on astro-turfing bots.
Ooooh that's crazy. Why are people not joining fediverse ? I think we need some marketing people to band together and create easy guides on how to sign up and share it on Facebook, YouTube etc
Those AI ones like Perplexity.ai, Kagi FastGPT and even Copilot (Bing Chat) give good results not just in the responses, but also in the links they return.
I've been slowly pivoting toward Perplexity.AI as the search engine. It basically does what I do, search + find the resources and summarize it but it is automatic with Perplexity.AI.
I rather pay them 20$ because that is saving me time a lot (and time is money in my case). Kagi's search is okay but I can get nearly the same by using ublocklist on Bing or DDG for my use case.
I mostly use bing now. I like that it can answer complex queries and provides sources.
Don't have much trouble not finding things.
Its nice when you are deep in Microsoft already from your company and get BingChat Enterprise included anyways.
Its slower than OpenAI GPT4 at times and its alot more restricted, but it gets the job done mostly.
You need to hack the UI to make it nice, unlock longer inputs, disable search tool at-will, disable synthetic streaming responses (consistent token speed, but takes longer overall)
Simple query via DDG, complex stuff and ChatBot stuff via BingChat Enterprise.
I thought the AI assistant was free? I just downloaded the bang app and I just use the AI assistant whenever I search for anything now.
I don't use any sort of enterprise, or full disclosure know what any of the other things you said are, any of those options or parameters.
But bing's really impressed me lately, haha, so I still use it.
Actually on my desktop, I just use the regular Bing search, which I do now find superior to Google for just finding quick accurate answers for basic stuff.
It's still crazy to me a year later after switching all my default search engines to Bing after using Google for so long, but Google search is just such trash now, it's insane.
It is free, but the Enterprise version doesnt store anything (not even usage statitistics) and runs on separate systems (allegedly) aswell as having no limits.
Oh, I see, yeah that does sound way better
I like the french one "qwant".
Brave Search works really well for me, and they have AI responses at the top of the page now that are really good.
Thanks! Never given brave a try before
Not sure why you got downvoted like crazy, but Brave legitimately has a great search engine. It also uses its own crawlers unlike DDG, Startpage or Kagi who are really just meta search engines piggybacking off other companiesā results.
Good thing I wasn't replying to the down voters. OP got my response and that is what I wanted. š