A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
I recommend startpage.com over duckduckgo. It provides at least the same privacy as DDG while having generally better results because it uses google's results instead of bing's.
Edit: The ultimate search engine though, as mentioned by macattack, is SearxNG because it combines privacy with every other search engine and even allows you to mix and match your result sources.
With all the SEO garbage, are G**gle results still relevant? I haven’t used it in years for anything serious.
Startpage is owned by a advertising company and closed source. wouldnt really recommend it
My first choice is actually Kagi these days. I pay for my search provider to have some peace of mind that my search provider isn't selling me.
I got it not too long ago, and I love it. The results are good, and the features are what i wish all search engines had. Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
In the meantime, everyone should check out their Small Web intiative. Gives you a random blog or small website. There's some really good articles I would have never read otherwise.
I used to pay for kagi, but their CEO have some opinions that I absolutely hate about how to handle some issues, and this was a deal breaker for me. Nowadays I'm using searxng
What opinions can I ask? first time I've heard this
They announced a few months ago that they would partner with Brave to surface Brave search results too. The CEO of Brave is known to be homophobic. People got mad, and Kagi’s response was that they are too small to be picky, and have to focus on search quality.
And theres the issue someone opened on their page suggesting to include a special card on suicide related searches telling people how to find help, and the CEO dismissed saying it can be just someone curious making the search and he don't want to "set a precedent" on showing things the user is not actively searching
I... think I agree with that though.
I'm not saying there isn't a grey area between being socially conscious or full blow libertarian, but I do think that a search engine operates much better when it is unrestricted by societal qualms.
Look how stunted ChatGPT becomes with each new rendition, or how SDXL is far more restrictive in what it can express compared to its earlier SD1.5 models.
And also, like, their partnership with one of the most immoral companies on this planet drive most of the search results quality from the very beginning (Google). You didn't sign up for a morally perfect search engine.
When people made such a huge fuss about the CEO of some minor index that Kagi also happens to use beside like 10 others being a douche, all I could do is shake my head.
does kagi spit out location-relevant information? that's something I've really missed on startpage, I like being able to just google "chinese food" and have the restaurants near me spit back out, and if a privacy-centered search engine can return a result comparable to something like google there that'd make me real happy
Nope. For that I use the bang shortcut feature to send it to Google.
One nice thing about that, is that you can use g as a bang, instead of !g. It’s a little thing but easier to type on mobile.
I use startpage.
Also a bit unrelated, but I just found that Gigablast shut down 10 months ago. And also this (a bit earlier) comment from the author: (source)
Yeah, Google forced my search engine basically out of business. I had ixquick.com as a big client at one time; I was providing them with search results from my custom web search engine. Then their CEO called me one day and told me he was cancelling, even though he'd been a client for over 10 years. He said it was because of some change Google had made to their agreement. Ixquick needed Google's results and ads for their startpage.com website, and, even though my results were shown on their ixquick.com and later ixquick.eu sites, apparently Google wasn't good with that.
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users' privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO 'SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge' and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer's own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
And it was initially founded in 1996!
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
Source: https://metager.org/lang
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And other useful features, for example:
That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use "OPEN ANONYMOUSLY"; this also affects the following links.
Source: https://metager.org/tips
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
duckduckgo is a US company and the CEO is the previous founder of The Names Database. i don’t know how anyone trusts it when there are so many EU alternatives
I've used DDG for years but I'm worried that Microsoft has some power with them. Also that its headquarters is in the US, where there are hardly any laws that protect the user. I used Qwant for a season, based in France, but he asked me to remove the browser's ad blocker. Since then, I use a SearXNG instance, waiting to mount my own. Very happy.
I think mojeek is the best in privacy atm but it isn't really good as a search engine.
you can smash the "submit feedback" button on the page when you get a duff search and send it into us, it's how we improve: https://blog.mojeek.com/2024/02/major-algorithm-update.html
Will do and i love your ethics.
No one really talks about it and it's in its infancy, but I've really been enjoying Stract.com
I really want to like stract but I can't get it to give me good results. I typically search for programming related things and it has difficulty pulling up relevant information regarding things like documentation and posts regarding the issue.
That's fair, I can't say I've daily-driven it yet since I've still got my Kagi sub, but I'm thinking of defaulting it on my work computer to put it through its paces. It's done fairly well with some of my tests, but definitely seems to still be getting refined, I've noticed recent information can be difficult to find on it
My own searx-ng instance (routed via VPN), followed by Startpage
Stract seems like an interesting option with optics and such. What is your opinion on it?
I only just started using it recently, so i don't have a solid opinion yet, but it seems pretty good!
Thanks! I guess I’ll just try and using it for a while :)
This is what I use because they take your ad revenue and plant trees. Judge for yourself.
Second this, it's fast and they have good privacy practices as far as I'm aware.
Kagi
coming up to 20 years of no tracking, 18 of having the first privacy policy to say it: https://web.archive.org/web/20060318104627/http://www.mojeek.com/privacy.html
hopefully a good consensus 😅 at least seen very little of people saying bad
Me too and when i tried it the results were on par with google which isn't saying much nowadays though.
Duck duck go is my 2nd lol. SearX is my first.
gemini search engines are not so bad for likeminded folks with likeminded topics.
ex: 12 results!
vs searching windows how to pay for windows. 0 results. srry. gemini is small.
Gemini as in google AI search? Or gemini as in the protocol?
I have started using Yandex recently and so far, it is decent, but no different than DDG. The minor annoyance I have is that some links and text are in the Russian language.
Working for me..
DDG still works fine for me are you sure ?