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.
I use a mix of all 3 search engines on firefox
Bing is the best
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.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.
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.
Somebody reply to this so I remember to spin up a container tomorrow lmao
Try remindme bot - https://github.com/PangoraWeb/remindme-bot#usage
Hey, remember to spin up a container!
I did, thanks! 😛 Took a few tries but was over complicating the configs apparently lol
What about metasearch engines/ search aggregators?
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.
Not sure I’m ready to pay for search especially not at $5-10/mo.
Yep. Like $1.99 or $2.99 I can easily justify but $5/mo for only 300 searches feels too steep to me reguardless of result quality. I’ll just go through the other pages of results from any other search engine.
$10 gets you unlimited searches now. Idk about you, but I was continually frustrated with the results from all of the other search engines. I figured $10 is a small cost for my sanity, and privacy.
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I haven’t heard of that service before, so I can’t say.
If you’re not spending some money then you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Would you really prefer the web continue to be supported by ads and people who sell data about you?
If you’re not spending some money then you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
- BSD (e.g. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, …)
- GNU/Linux (e.g. kernel, Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, …)
- GNU/FSF/FOSS software (e.g. LibreOffice, Vim, Emacs, , Compiler Collection, Gnome & KDE desktop, GIMP, VLC, Wine, Python, …)
- Misc. (e.g. Wikipedia (& Kiwix), Gutenberg (& Calibre), Archive.org, CreativeCommons,org, OpenStreetMap, Lemmy, R, …)
- Plenty of public schools, public library, charities, …
Would like to argue with you. However, supporting these projects directly, if you can afford to, is something of a personal responsibility.
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That statement didn’t give you the money to pay for it though
People can do without search. Most will find better uses for 10$ an hour. Those who can’t probably won’t buy search. So, lose-lose for you who tries to convince people in every post.
People can do without search
This post is specifically asking for a search engine recommendation.
Yeah but they aren’t coming in here for the lack of options. They wanted to hear what’s everybody else on. I suppose you can make the argument that demand is there for paid search… but that’s because people have trained helplessness. Apart from 1 paid company i am not sure if people will have appetite for more companies in this space… because enshittification will happen here too.
It’s $5-$10 per month, not $10 per hour. LOL
$10/mo, not hour, god that would be an insane search bill
Funny i understood it meant $10 per month but made the mistake typing.
I appreciate the non-ad-funded option, even if it is expensive, but I’m not sure it’s even better than Google, looking at their sample results.
For example, Steve Jobs (again, to be clear, this is the result they specifically provide as an example of why you should pay) has two different links to the same Wikipedia article in the first five results. https://kagi.com/search?q=steve+jobs
Not to put you on the spot, but I’m still open to be convinced - do you have any examples of when Kagi did a great job to compare?
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check out ecosia.org! plant trees while you search! 🌳
Downside is that it sells ads and information
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.
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.
Duckduckgo if you use a vpn, everyone else throws speedbumos at VPN users… Prove your a human…
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.
Sorry it didn’t work for you…
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.
Even better if you can get into a family plan with friends
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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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For that price I can just spool up a vps and run a Searxng instance.
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.
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Brave statement
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Kagi is the best around if you are willing to pay. If I had to cancel my subscription for whatever reason, I would go back to DDG.
Do you like to swim in your cash vault like Scrooge McDuck?
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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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But it doesn’t track you. So, better Privacy
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How so? It existed before bing.
Interesting, when DDG fails to give me anything worth while, I go to Bing and usually get what I’m looking for.
People use bing? I find the results just like a dogs breakfast. Such a mess.
I use bing more and more. It’s not fantastic but feels like it’s on track to be ome better than google.
It used to be Google search without the extras.
They have changed the way they gather results since they first launched.
Ok so it’s a bing proxy basically?
How would you go about setting searxng for search suggestions? I’m not sure i understand the documentation.
I use stratpage. I find it reliable
