Since Internet search has and will change, which search engines do you use successfully, and what are their advantages?
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).
Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called “Lens”, which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I’ve defined - see image.Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
(copied from another thread I replied to)
Also, TIL about URL rewrites! Now all of my search results use private frontends. Thanks for the tip!
Interesting. I just searched some topics related to a paper I’m working on and found some good resources which I haven’t seen on Google yet. Really interesting.
I use you.com as it’s centered on an ai chatbot and pulls in traditional web search results to augment it’s answers. it works quite well.
deleted by creator
I use a searxng instance as-well, one I can host myself. Besides the cool factor of hosting your own personal search engine you can tweak the setting a on a server level as you wish and you know the machine your queries are going to.
When I want to try something AI related I use the Bing AI though, it can pull from multiple search results when giving an answer which is cool.
What paid plan do you use ? If it’s not the ultimate plan, do you often go over the “limit” ? I’m interested, but I have a hard time knowing what plan I will actually require.
I’m also on the early adopter unlimited plan. What I suggest is that you take a conservative plan and observe your behavior, you can always upgrade to a bigger plan later
I use DuckDuckGo, I forgot how to live without the search tags such as !yt, !fb, !w to search specific sites.
Startpage, google search results without ads, trackers but much slower, the slowness can get annoying sometimes when my internet speed is bad
Honestly? Bing chat has been quite good to me if I have specific questions. It searches the web and gives me a summary.
I have switched to Ecosia few days ago. No conplains so far. Its free, and builds off Bing IIRC.
I have been intrigued by Kagi, but Im not really ready to pay a sub for a search engine.
Same, I have been using Ecosia for 3-4 years. Does it job and even if it doesn’t, I can just try other search engine after.
If the number were to be trusted, I already plant almost 100 trees doing nothing. Ngl, does feel good for my conscience.
I use DuckDuckGo and it workw quite well and at least they say they protect your privacy (I am sure they do a better job than GAFAM/BigTech spyware mafia), but am looking for something better since I found out it has some agreement with Microsoft and I do not trust those spyware-producing convicted monopoly abusers at all.
Kagi
Brave Search for the majority of things. Ecosia and sometimes Searx.
I’m sort of between search engines. I currently use SearXNG on my laptops and LibreX on my phone. These are metasearch engines, so they usually pull in more and better results than, say, Google alone. SearXNG is good because it’s very private (depending of course on who hosts it); while LibreX is nice because it’s simple, allows custom redirects for popular services (e.g. YouTube -> CloudTube), and it doesn’t use JavaScript.
I think my crappy Android tablet uses Mojeek, but it’s been a while since I last used it. I’ve also recently tried out MetaGer (rejected because some features required payment), Qwant (rejected because Privacy Badger saw a fair number of trackers) and SwissCows (rejected because of constant internal server errors).
The only thing missing from my current engines is filters for image search. Qwant and SwissCows let me specify the aspect ratio, vague size, colour, and license of the results. Mojeek, SearXNG and LibreX unfortunately do not offer this; which is why I’m between search engines at the minute.
I have to shout out Wiby. It is focused on like weird personal websites from the early 2000s, that kind of thing. Absolutely not a general-purpose search engine, but mashing the “surprise me” button will take you to all sorts of fun places.
I’m just hitting ‘surprise me’ and having a blast.
In the same vain, there’s marginalia search.
Brave search works well, but I have the feeling they are playing with user’s data otherwise I can’t explain their business model
Ads, according to their privacy policy.
