Duckduckgo does not cut it. Bing … no thanks Searx: dunno, how is your experience with it?
thanks
Searx.
Not at all; there are tons of newish engines out there, the best of which are trying to carve out a niche for themselves in an area that Google and Bing ignore. I listed 44 English engines with their own indexes, along with some for other languages which I’m unfortunately unable to review because I don’t speak the langs required.
On these engines, you won’t get far if you use natural language queries or expect the engine to make inferences. Use broad terms and keywords instead. I recommend giving Mojeek, Marginalia, Teclis, Petal (bad privacy, but usable through Searx), Kagi, and Alexandria a try.
Petal Search. A search engine by Huawei that recently switched from searching for Android apps to general search in order to reduce dependence on Western search providers. Despite its surprisingly good results, I wouldn’t recommend it due to privacy concerns…
*lists Google Search, the most antiprivacy search engine by an advertising company*
The hypocrisy in that statement is unreal…
I said that about Petal because readers likely hadn’t heard of it and didn’t have any expectations. l assume readers already knew Bing, Google, and Yandex were bad for privacy.
Im also curious what those privacy concerns are. Hopefully not just “China bad”.
This is their privacy policy: https://h5hosting-dra.dbankcdn.com/cch5/petalsearch/global/agreement/privacy-statement.htm?language=en-us
It includes detailed fingerprinting metrics like mouse behavior and font information.
I should probably link it, thanks for the feedback.
I’m using searx for at least a year now and it’s great.
I also heard recommendation about whoogle, and you can also check out brave search.
I had some trouble adopting Searx, but once I found out about Searxng I was able to handle that. A little bit of presentation made the difference.
I just use MetaGer and rely on keywords search…
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It seems search engines are becoming less important for researching online, we now focus more on social media or specific websites. Often, I search directly on reddit, imdb, twitter or mastodon, spotify, youtube, stack overflow etc. For the rest, I use Qwant as the main and I’m quite ok with it
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Sorry if I upset anyone, but why DDG does not cut it? I’ve been using it so far, and the !bangs are one thing I’d miss in any search engine nowadays which I never found. I’ve tried Ecosia, but as an Engineer who doesn’t want to waste time, I’ve missed the !bangs
DDG censors Russian websites. For me thats a complete disqualification.
Don’t !bangs work in Searx either? At least in searx.ebnar.xyz they do.
I’ve tried a few bangs like
!ghcode <some_code>and it doesn’t seem to work out, is it something I have to enable?SearXNG is quite awesome, thanks for this one
you need to use “!” twice,
!!ghcode <some_code>.thanks! that helped 😎
Maybe this helps: https://searx.github.io/searx/user/search_syntax.html
It still has limited features compared to DDG, and it has a different syntax.
Don’t be sorry. Good for you if you had/have good experience with DDG. I was an earlier user then occasionally but I always had to resort to google at the end.
Searxng is growing on me, so we will see.
I think for my next project I’m gunna be looking into setting up topic focused search engines, particularly for substance use and harm reduction.
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~muuo/blog/build-yourself-a-mini-search-engine/
Doesn’t seem too hard, has anyone ever done something like this? Curious about overhead costs and the like.
I tried making my own search engine based on Nutch (sometime around 2000).
We created a directory of sites, with a strict selection, because. had experience in administering Dmoz, but these sites that were added to our catalog were indexed. Not deep, just 1 click from the main page.
But then we did not have enough capacity to carry out a good search.
Now I’m thinking about getting back to it. As part of one project that I am writing now (MIT license. Directory example: https://libarea.ru/web). We are experimenting, learning, facets for navigation, we will fasten the search later, there is still a lot of work.
The key (for google) is to use search parameters. Such as…
site:stackoverflow.com “javascript” “header”
- site:stackoverflow.com - includes only stackoverflow.com results.
- “javascript” “header” - those terms must exist on a webpage, for it to be included in search results.
And Startpage gives the same results as Google, but without trackers or AMP results (via an automatic proxy)
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StartPage was purchased by System1, a US ad-tech firm. Might want to keep an eye out for any policy changes.
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