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?
DuckDuckGo on Firefox. If you truly want to de-google your life avoid Chrome and Chromium based browsers like Edge and Brave
DuckDuckGo is Bing. It’s just stripped of Microsoft “extras”.
But it doesn’t track you. So, better Privacy
ublock origin says otherwise
SearXNG
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.
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.
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?
ecosia, like knowing that my searchs are helping the world a little
Bing is the best
Duckduckgo if you use a vpn, everyone else throws speedbumos at VPN users… Prove your a human…
I’m out of the loop on DDG, what did they do?
So iirc, they were caught suppressing/promoting results to push the Russian narrative at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. 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.
Do you have a source for that?
It’s actually the opposite. The downranked sites they considered Russian propaganda which made a lot free speech enthusiasts mad.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/duckduckgo-russian-disinformation-downranking.html
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.
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?
I’m still using it but it was fun when they had something along the lines of “your privacy is safe with us. Also, wanna leave your email?” 😅
I am thinking of migrating to Kagi now, because search in DDG is often meh
I use a mix of all 3 search engines on firefox
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:
Random SearX Redirector – basically just that, sends your search to a random working SearXNG instance
This is super rad! I’ve never heard of this, so thanks for sharing.
Thanks, friend. My main problem with using SearX was that instances kept dying on me and I would have to track down a new one every week or so.
Thanks for the shoutout, it’s always much-appreciated. If you’re looking to test new things/ help us out in other ways, we’re testing a new algo :D
Nice, I’ll try it out, thanks!
Coming back half a year later to see this comment. Thank you for thank link. I would love to help out!
It’s not currently got something live on it to test (you can use it but it should be the same results across both). If you wanna help out then let us know how you find Mojeek via this survey please!!! https://blocksurvey.io/mojeek-user-survey-2024-mJmJ2bBcQDy9QtByOmJX7A?v=o
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 like AskJeeves but a case can be made for WebCrawler
I run a whole 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.
Of what?
Of shit auto correct, whoogle, open source privacy frontend for google
https://kagi.com no ads, great results. It’s $5 a month but worth it imo
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.
