Google’s results have been getting worse over time, but it seems like the last couple years, they’ve taken a steep nose-dive, completely overrun with crappy content farming.
I’ve mitigated a lot of that by doing searches for any kind of product comparison or technical question with “site:reddit.com”, but now with the possibility that that trick will become less useful over time as well…?
Yeah. What search engines are other tech folks using?
DuckDuckGo.
Bangs are awesome, I set it as my browser bar search, and I can search for cheese discounts in my local supermarket with one search string.
Try it, type !appie kaas into DDG.
I personally like duck duck go, the results are generally pretty good, and if they aren’t, it’s easy to search on other engines using DDG’s bangs. You just type “!g search term” and you can search on Google, and there’s a bunch more, like !w for Wikipedia, !aur for the arch user repo etc etc
How did I not know about that already? I’ve been on DDG for a years.
There are a lot of bangs as well.
Try
!loblaws maple syrupas I see you’re from Canada.O damn! That’s bound to come in handy.
And to see if there is a bang already for a website you use often, use
!bang lemmyor whatever to see the list of !bangs for that site
+1 for DDG
And thank you for reminding about bangs
I use DuckDuckgo through Firefox. It’s great and there are good extensions for extra safety. Also, Firefox deskopt is so customizable, i got a neon cityscape design for the bar!
Same here. I honestly didn’t notice a big difference between google and DDG when I switched. I generally found what I was looking for back then and I do now too.
Not enough people have said SearXNG yet, so hands down, SearXNG. You can change a lot of settings in the Docker code, so your settings are the default for anyone that uses it. If you prefer the actual default, you can save settings per browser with a local cookie.
thanks to this post, i’m trying out searxng and then kagi, neither of which i knew. hopefully there’s a searx instance configured roughly to how i’d want. i’m not philosophically opposed to paying, but search is a delicate thing to be personally identifiable - and i don’t care what your privacy policy is, if you’re taking my money, you can connect me with my clicks
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).
Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
I saw they charge, looked around a bit for how much, couldn’t figure it out and noped out.
It’s not hard to find… you click the big yellow “Sign Up” button and it will show you a price list
This looks pretty good, and I wouldn’t mind paying for search, but it seems really pricy. I’ve never counted how many searches I do, but it’s definitely more than 10 a day. $10 a month seems like a lot for just search…
Made me feel a little unwell at the beginning as well, but considering that the search is one of the main, key features I use daily, multiple times, it is totally worth it.
I pay for a search engine, but:
- High quality search results
- No ads
- High customizability
- No weird SEO optimized Website results which help me not at all and I lose hours in a year clicking them by accident
- Did I mention no ads or sponsored content?
Does that means it’s not a search engine by itself, but uses the indexes of other search engines and refine them?
SearXNG personally
I really like SearXNG for searching. It combines results from multiple search engines (that you define) and strips out advertisements. You can host your own SearXNG instance if you are in to self hosting, or you can use one of the many available public instances.
SearXNG has come a long way. I self-host, and I consistently get more reliable results than when I use Google, and you can set it to replace something like twitter.com with nitter.net or reddit.com with teddit.net, so you can still visit those sites automatically on mobile (not sure, but that might be a self-host only thing).
Thanks for the tip! Just set up my docker container. How do you configure the hostname replacements? In the UI Preferences menu, there’s just a toggle switch for “Hostname Replace”, but nowhere to input a list of names.
What are the privacy implications of you being the only person using an instance? I was under the impression that part of the privacy from SearXNG was by obfuscation because of many different people searching from the the same instance. I thought about self hosting it, but didn’t want to share with the vps I pay for now.
I guess at the end of the day that I don’t have many concerns for privacy. I am not searching for things that might get me on a watch list. Searching from my private instance is no more/less secure in terms of privacy than it would be if I did a Google search. The search endpoints (Google, Bing, DDG, etc) all know the IP that the search is coming from even if its passing through SearXNG first. So if I was doing something shady, I could easily be tracked down that way.
The main reason I run my own SearXNG is so I can strip ads and search multiple search providers from a single search.
And I think that is a totally reasonable purpose to host it! I just wanted to see if I understood this correctly. I like the concept but am not sure if I want to spend another weekend setting up another VPS.
If you are familiar with Docker, you can easily run it in your existing VPS. It doesn’t use a lot of resources.
If you are not familiar with Docker, you should look in to it.
Been using duckduckgo for years. At least for the type of content I’m usually searching for, mostly tech related stuff, it seems to me that it has always had great results.
I use startpage, that returns the same results as google but keeping you private and with no annoying ads
Startpage also appears to give me better results when I quote a search team than the other non-Google engines.
What search engine I use? All of them. I use Searxng.
I primarily use Kagi, but I will fall back to DDG when I need to.
What do you think of Kagi? What sorts of scenarios / search types do you find yourself needing to fall back to a different search engine?
Kagi is great, I never really need to fall back to anything else.
