I’m trying to degoogle. I’ve heard good things about DuckDuckGo and I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and it’s pretty solid. But I’m just wondering what the Lemmy/Piefed community prefer for a search engine.
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I switched from DuckDuckGo to Waterfox’s paid search engine (https://search.waterfox.com/) because I wanted to send a few dollars per month to a Firefox fork. It uses Google’s search index, so the results are good, and it has no AI-generated responses. I just want a Firefox fork to be financially sustainable, so I’m paying for it. I don’t think it has any advantages over noai.duckduckgo.com, though.
I’ll also check https://marginalia-search.com/ every once in a while, since I like the idea of an independent search engine with their own index. It also has some creative features around discovering small, related websites. Feels like an “early internet” search engine.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ is pretty awesome for getting human generated / small web content.
If I’m looking for people sharing my hyper-fixation https://aboutideasnow.com/ is excellent. https://searchmysite.net/ is a indieweb opti-in only tool with similar usecases but not much is there. Lemmy
https://www.mojeek.com/ I have as my default browser search to try to support as its the only real large index comparable to Google and Bing (DDG uses), but it falls short a lot.
DDG is my primary engine when I need something fast / the others don’t work.
If I can’t find it in the small web and regular search fails, I’ll sometimes try the udm14 Google trick https://udm14.com/
After that its posting to the askfedi hashtag (or ask here)
I use DDG as well. Have for years now, it’s actually gotten to the point where it gives similar if not better results than Google Search for me now.
DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes
Quite a lot of the time. It’s pretty damn awful, actually.
search.brave.com is pretty good, as is DuckDuckGo. But I’ve lately taken a liking to qwant.com. it’s pretty good and not American.
DuckDuckGo.
Like others have said, there’s really no getting around that Google has the best search engine from a functional standpoint. So I use DuckDuckGo for my personal reasons, but if I’m dissatisfied with the results, I will open up a “private” browser and do a Google search.
Qwant on my computers and DDG on my mobile.
NoAI DuckDuckGo (noai.duckduckgo.com)
it has decent enough results and disables the unwanted AI features (I don’t want to prompt an LLM whenever I search something)
I am willing to switch to something else, right now DDG is good enough.
TIL about that option, thanks.
I’ve used DDG for the past 7 years or so. When ever I don’t find what I’m looking for I just add !g to the search term and it Googles it for me.
No ai ddg has been a decent general search engine, but if I can’t find something I’ll us marginalia, mojeek, alltheinternet, and even yandex (if I’m desperate). For your research: InstallGentoo Wiki has a fairly comprehensive list of search engines albeit not the most up to date; Seirdy has a blog post reviewing many search engines including some more niche ones; and The Search Engine Map illustrates which engines use what index.
I’m using paid Kagi subscription, and it makes searching for stuff feel like it used to before Big Tech broke the internet. I can actually find what I’m looking for again.
The “SlopStop” feature is worth it alone, but I love how I can choose what types of results and sources to prioritize.
10/10 Highly recommended.
Qwant/Ecosia.
Used to use Kagi (paid search engine, if you don’t know it) which was truly remarkable and well worth its cost, at least in my eyes. But, as a EU citizen, last year US shit show, made me realize I’d better rely less on US-based tech. So…
Agreed. If anyone knows about an EU (or allies) search engine with a business model that’s not strictly based on advertising (topped up by grants perhaps), let us know.
I use Ecosia/Qwant for now.
Yeah I’m with Qwant for the moment.
I used to use Kagi.
I used to use DDG before that.
I don’t really have any complaints about any of these.
I’m trying to get better at using bangs to search on the sites I’m specifically looking for.
Just curious, what made you change from Kagi?
The CEO said some stuff.
IIRC a blogger said something unfavourable and he went thermo nuclear. Not that big a deal.
At the time though it seemed like the alternatives were just as good.
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I use StartPage, but I keep an eye on Marginalia. It finds sites that other search engines miss.
Kagi. I know it gets trash talked for several reasons, but I’ve used ecosia, duckduckgo, tried searxng, and now I’m back to Kagi. I just like it better all around.
It feels like spam to mention Kagi since it’s all over the place (even on Hacker News), but I’ve been a subscriber since the beginning and it made me a “2x programmer” due to their good results.
If I had no money left, I would try SearXNG.
For programming questions why not use an LLM? The days of searching a specific problem are long done. LLM+Documentation is all you really need now days.
I learn a lot while I search. LLMs may or may not hallucinate, and I’m not learning.
I tired it. I’m not unintelligent, and it was far too complex of a setup for me. I did not care for it. But that’s just me.
Been a Kagi user for about 6 months now. Not one negative thing to say. So refreshing to have good results again.
Kagi user since 2022, according to my account. I’ll admit that I rarely ever cross-check with other search engines. I like their assistants too (they are basically re-selling access to all big LLMs in their Ultimate tier). But you don’t really need those, what keeps me there are the good search results. (And the ability to easily block/raise whole domains on the results.)
Kagi. Every once in a while I tried out Qwant, but it’s just not there yet.
Can you describe why you think its better than Qwant or DDG? I tried it but didn’t felt that much difference to have an account for search engine.
I don’t know how those search engines evolved, but last time I checked (a few years ago), Qwant was the worst search engine ever, and DDG was pretty average. I don’t know how Kagi works, but it’s good for every query. I usually don’t recommend it because it’s expensive ($10 a month) but it really changed how I work, especially for programming topics.
As an example, Qwant still uses w3schools as the reference for C++, which is some “4chan trolling” level of stupidity.
being able to block/downrank/uprank domains from search results, being able to block AI from search results, rewriting URLs (for example, reddit.com to old.reddit.com), kagi translate, bangs (ddg has them but qwant does not)
