• doctortofu@reddthat.com
    30·
    6 months ago

    SearXNG - it’s a meta-engine that serves results from a combination of other ones (you can set up which ones you want to use). I like it a lot. Here’s a list of public instances: https://searx.space/

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    21·
    6 months ago

    They all kinda suck.

    I use DDG since it works without complaining on vpns, but if that doesn’t work I fall back to google, and eventually kagi

    Search is really terrible now

    • gigachad@sh.itjust.works
      7·
      6 months ago

      It will get much worse as soon as the internet had another 3-4 cycles where it has been digested to train LLMs and puked out again by LLMs to shitty websites. Then you have the option to search for that shit traditionally or to use another shitty LLM on top of that

        • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          6 months ago

          I pay with a crypto account and a dedicated email account. In this world you make your own privacy, everyone is out to get your info. Yes, they track my search trends and likely don’t do anything too nefarious with it now, but it’s only a matter of time before they do, but my trends in that account is all they will get and since there are no ads and I can play a part in content filtering and prioritization on Kagi, I am far less a victim than many other platforms.

          • rusticus@lemm.ee
            3·
            6 months ago

            Just because it’s a dedicated email account doesn’t mean it’s not traceable to you.

  • 098qwelkjzxc@feddit.uk
    17·
    6 months ago

    They’re all crap because they all track you, but I stick with DuckDuckGo because I find their lies about not tracking me to be comforting enough

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
      5·
      6 months ago

      How does that work, does it go out and start indexing the internet for you?

        • lud@lemm.ee
          3·
          6 months ago

          That’s a shame, It would be more interesting to run your own crawlers.

          (Yes I realise that would be computationally intense and hard, but it would nonetheless be cool)

          • whaleross@lemmy.world
            3·
            6 months ago

            There is probably a neat wget oneliner that could crawl everything on the open web. The real challenge is how to index all the information. That might be a neat Perl oneliner.

    • dkc@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 months ago

      I’ve found for the last 3-4 years I haven’t had to fall back to Google. DDG results have been good enough I can use it full time.

      • Bebo@literature.cafeEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        In my case I’ve found the need to use Google for local searches, and certain very specific searches (one example is journal impact factors). In a lot of other cases, DDG has actually given me better results - I was getting fed up with some of the crappy results I was getting using Google, which prompted me to try out and eventually shift to DDG.

  • RGB3x3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    6 months ago

    People here need to try Qwant. It’s refreshing how clean it is and I think the search results are pretty good

  • brb@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    6 months ago

    DDG for everyday browsing and Kagi’s free trial for more “difficult” searches.

    I’m not sure how many Kagi searches I have left but I’m most likely buying the unlimited plan when I run out.

  • whaleross@lemmy.world
    6·
    6 months ago

    DDG, but ever so often I have to use bangs to Google or some dedicated sites. Been trying out my own instance of the SearchX meta search engine but honestly it’s not that much of a difference except it lags. I’ve been using ChatGPT way more for direct questions instead of using search words and sifting through the results, with the risk of hallucination so still need to double check on important stuff. Copilot sort of works but I don’t know why I’m not comfortable with it. Too bad Gemeni seems to be a dud so far. I’d love to see a FOSS language model that can be tweaked for personal interests and custom commands for external APIs and that gives references to the answers.

  • 7uWqKj@lemmy.world
    6·
    6 months ago

    Where, sadly, „search engine“ essentially means „Bing frontend“ these days …

  • SleepyWheel@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    6 months ago

    I just cancelled Kagi. It’s good but not really good enough to justify the cost, plus stuff detailed here https://www.osnews.com/story/139270/do-not-use-kagi/

    I gave yandex a quick run, it’s actually very good, functionally, but a privacy nightmare.

    Currently trying out Mojeek, one of the few outside the big three to have it’s own index. Pretty good - not all the conveniences of the bigger ones but maybe good enough most of the time