You must log in or # to comment.
Abandon search engines, normalize asking your cousins your questions again
Library help desk
Mojeek ?
I sometimes use that Marginalia search.
Unless something has changed, that chart is incorrect. I stopped using startpage earlier this year when they announced the inclusion of ai.
Every single search provider mentioned includes AI as an option. Fortunately, they all gave an option to just turn it off. It’s annoying, but if they find that users want these AI summaries, they need to add them as an option to compete.
Do users actually want such AI summaries? Is there any good polling on this?
I mostly read about people being annoyed by companies pushing hard for AI, and trying to get rid of those unrequested summaries.
I wish more of them just had an option to highlight excerpts from pages or Wikipedia articles like google used to do exclusively. But I’m sure that harder to build :/
xprivo? Based in Luxie.
I liked startpage until it broke for my setup, it does not work well with proxy’s, VPN and AdBlock. DuckDuckGo is my go to engine. Maybe in the near future I will setup searx. Also , in Germany there is ecosia but it also broke because of my setup.
Searx is not the easy one. Many instances don’t work, and the working ones hardly show relevant results.
Self-hosted isn’t as unstable because you don’t end up getting blocked by throttling as often if you’re the only user. Public instances tend to get hammered by bots and LLMs these days. Just put it behind a reverse proxy with a login or a VPN to keep others out. I use keycloak SSO in Traefik on a VPS, but pangolin works well for my web apps in my home. That said, it requires setup and maintenance. But no tracking since you own the server.
But TBH no generalized search engines are really good these days. They all mostly all overrun either by monetization schemes and ads or have been manipulated by SEO, so rarely give good results. I’ve been exploring lots of alternatives, but not many are any good.
