A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
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~
Kagi. Yes, it's paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:
I didn't know it was privacy focused or that they were building their own index, that's really cool. Do you think it's worth the money?
It's only a few bucks a month. I think so.
The only thing I don't like is needing to be logged in to search. That always feels like a huge invasion of privacy. The at least claim that they don't log search contents though
For some reason the thought of a paid search engine has never even crossed by mind before. I've been using DDG but this has peaked my curiosity. Thank you.
Edit: The pricing is... very... meh.
It is very meh. But I think if you're able to, it's well worth the price. Just don't get the standard plan. That one is god awful.
Kagi is absolutely wonderful. Highly recommend giving it ago. Gives me better results than google while having a fair privacy policy
I want to give it a try but it's hard to justify the cost with limited searches. I don't want to have to keep track of how many times I've searched or second guess if I "really need to search for that".
DuckDuckGo. I can't live without !bangs.
Do you mean like !google or !amazon ? I use ddg. Just making sure I know what you mean
SearX-ng
It's not comparable in quality at all...
Isn't that hard to determine without specifying which engines are used in your chosen instance? Searx/Searng has provided superior results for me using a combination of engines compared to anything provided by any of the alternatives by themselves.
It can literally use any search engine you think of as a backend, so its strictly higher quality? Unless thats what you meant
DuckDuckGo, but I've been testing Qwant (also privacy focused) lately as well.
Duck duck go first, and if results are shit, I default back to google
SearX-NG, coming off DuckDuckGo it wasn't a major change in the internal structure (the search gets relayed over to a larger search engine), but there's no one company behind it like DDG. They've been working together with Microsoft on some rather sketchy things.
I would still love to self-host something decent (that doesn't relay over to a company), but nothing like that exists as far as I know.
From what i know the exemption thing was only in the app and has been removed by now and so far the alternatives are... Not very Suitable for everyday use, at least for me.
I've heard similar things several times, so I've been staying away. I should move more of my daily tasks to different self-hosted or non-corporate services.
I've been using SearXNG. It is a fork of SearX, a popular open source metasearch search engine. Basically SearX allows you to use multiple search engines for a search, and only the results are there, no ads. SearXNG changes the UI to be better, adds some other engines for a variety of things to search, like images. Currently I'm using ericafteric.top as my instance; it is the fastest US instance with search suggestions support since I can't selfhost.
Startpage. It uses Googles results, but you will not get tracked that much
DuckDuckGo
I also use Firefox search bookmarks for searching specific sites.
Search Bookmark: You prepare the URL with a %s placeholder and give the bookmark a tag, and you can type tag searchterm and it'll open it.
I'm using it for opening word definitions, word translations, searching reference documentation, searching specific platforms/websites/media types, etc.
Duck Duck Go. It just works for me. I've never had a problem with it's results.
I hate adds. I was using Neeva. Just switched to Kagi. After nearly 3 weeks, it looks like 300 searches/month will work for me. So $5 a month is fine.
DuckDuckGo
Duckduckgo for the most part, especially if I already know where I want to get to. Google as a backup like others are saying.
Most small search engines use bing results which are a hit or miss compared to Google.
Startpage is the only privacy focused one I found that uses Google search results. The UI is fine for the most part, except the image search maybe.
Edit: typo
Brave search since its okayish in terms of queries (the summarizer is a nice touch) but I really like the !bangs. Images and video though...disappointed
Google. Sue me, I really only care about results when it comes to search. It's mostly just Google and Bing actually providing results and Google's are better.
DuckDuckGo. I wanted something privacy-respecting, but Startpage was blocked in my country and SearX had problems with my language. Anyway I've heard an advertising company bought Starpage so I wont use it. Also bang shortcuts are great!
(Also is it just me or DDG doesn't approve new bangs now?)
DDG first, Google if that fails and I think the query should have gotten good results, Bing Chat if I'm still really not sure about a topic or if I want some of its summarization (or I'm just feeling lazy).
For the moment I am using brave search not on brave browser but as a firefox add-on, a fine tuned searx.be and perplexity.ai, which isnt a search engine but a connected chatgpt ai with links in the answers.
Another DuckDuckGo user here. I really like it but wish I could use boolean with it.
You can, it just works a bit differently than google if that is what youβre used to. It doesnβt outright exclude results with -, just de-emphasizes it in the results, of course with how tailored many web pages are to gaming search algorithms that doesnβt do much. If you want to outright eliminate certain websites from the search you can do that with -site:siteyouwantgone.here
Google, because of inertia and not being given a good reason to switch.
I use DuckDuckGo
Ecosia on my tablet because of nice integrated browser and DuckDuck+Firefox on the PC
Am also checking out Brave on PC at the moment
Bing because I'm getting paid for it
Duckduckgo, works like I want it to and it's not Google. Never had a problem with its search results either. Tried several others as well including searx and ecosia but I found their image search inferior to ddg's.
Kagi is better though. I was using ddg for a long time but had to use Google now and then to get good results.
Just Google, unless I'm looking to pirate something. Then I use Yandex.
DDG, it works well enough for me, and not that I got used to bangs I cannot let go of them
Ecosia on desktop, DuckDuckGo on mobile.
I've been using presearch.com and and quite happy with the results it gives for any question. Yes, there are one or two sponsored links, but the rest consists of great results
Oh wow, I checked it and for people simply lurking by, you can click on a website icon and instantly go do the research on that website
duckduckgo primarily, but have been starting to dabble with a self hosted Whoogle.
Bing because its AI is actually utilization is actually pretty useful and I am far too lazy to use a privacy oriented search . I know microsoft is sketchy and chatgpt is a little...uh....... yeah I will say that due to the other posts in here it is the first time I've ever heard of SearX-NG, and I am considering dumping bing now.
Startpage most of the time but its so slow in showing you the result. When im using the web for studying i just use google without an account because its just WAY faster