It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.
Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.
- Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
- Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
- Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
- Yandex: https://yandex.com/
If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?
EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.
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Many people keep asserting that DuckDuckGo is as useless as Google, but I haven’t had a single issue with it. Could it be a regional thing?
Ddg cannot filter out results. If you don’t want pages containing the term, term you add -term to your search and those results should not be included.
Ddg doesn’t do this. I did a brief test of many search engines, and only google and mojeek filtered results correctly.
Edit: yadex seems to have working filtering.
I don’t live in the US and the regional results for my country are worse on DuckDuckGo than on Google.
But still, I noticed Google’s quality drastically falling down in recent years.
DDG is ok for most searches, but they have definitely hit a plateau. Programming search results are quite poor, for instance.
I’ve started paying for kagi. Their results are just way better at this point.
Technically the best one was Altavista.
But they are long gone because they came from the old academic & idealistic internet and they never learned to survive in that internet where money rules.
Altavista was ahead of their time. The modern internet desperately needs a technical search engine.
From a very old memory, Google blew AltaVista out of the water no?
I mean we all switched for a reason and it wasn’t the cute logo.
Here are some options I use in my rotation.
Brave Search (skip the browser)
Mojeek
Qwant (French)
Yandex (Russian)
Mullvad Leta (Mullvad VPN subscription required)
MetaGer (German meta search)
Startpage (Private Google results)
DuckDuckGo (Private Bing results)
SearXNG and similar self hosted options are awesome, but I’ve found them unreliable.
Be skeptical of Kagi… It’s promoted pretty heavily around here for something that’s not FOSS.
I’m convinced at this point that Kagi is astroturfing on Lemmy, it’s unnatural. All they do is just cite the marketing page when questioned about the quality, or as to why they supposedly think it’s worth paying for compared to much more mature as-driven services that do respect your privacy.
Even though there’s a small monthly cost, the results have been consistent for Kagi. But consistency meets only half of my needs for search: I also want to make decisions quickly from what I find within the contents. If I were to to go to a link, wait for it to load, scroll the content, etc. – does that listed forum post have the answer I am looking for? Does this news article cover the nuances I have been tracking and would like to read more of? Kagi offers an AI-based summarize feature that helps. And that’s been meeting the other half of my needs, as well.
EDIT, an opinion: Search services may well be eventually replaced by small, niche LLMs trained to perform summerization tasks, such as Consensus, which I have used for work research, and Perplexity.ai. The AI summarize feature of Kagi is why I see the service as more useful than straight indexes, even when self-hosted. Kagi is a stepping stone toward this for me, and why I recommend it.
Lol kagi bots spotted!
A 7 months old random fediverse account is a bot? You know that the entirety of the fediverse is like 0.001 percent of the user base of the social media giants?
That would be money really badly spent on astro-turfing bots.
Come on over to Kagi! You do have to pay but I use a search engine dozens of times per day so I’m not too bothered by it.
Not when they collaborate with brave. Fuck that!
They don’t “collaborate” with Brave, just use its search API.
The owner of Kagi is a homophobic piece of shit.
Just use searxng.
If you are going to look for perfect companies, you will look forever, and probably use Google while you are looking.
It’s not worth it. Just use something better than Google even if it’s flawed, because everything had flaws.
Just use searxng.
Don’t give money to homophobes, we have an open source and better alternative already.
Kagi isn’t homophobic. Apparently the “controversy” is that it employs brave search as well; which is indeed made by a company with a homophobic ceo.
Though by that logic virtually everyone in the world is. Because at some point in time, in some place, someone built a piece of modern civilization upon knowledge or resources belonging to a homophobic person, I’m fairly sure.
No, that’s a seperate controversy. The Kagis owners views became talked about a lot more during that event though.
So many people here are quick to defend and normalise homophobia, yet refuses to just use an open source free alternative that’s without this baggage.
Are you sure none of the developers of the open source free alternative aren’t homophobic, transphobic, or in some other way bad people?
I think it’s perfectly understandable that some people are homophobes, so it doesn’t worry me. You still have people being afraid of black people in this age even.
You can dislike that of course, but that’s the real world. You can walk up to any older person and they are likely to be a lot less open to gay marriage than a younger person also.
You interpret that as them being hostile. I think it’s more about being afraid of something that doesn’t feel natural to them.
Yeah, get fucked mate :)
Where did you get that from?
It’s all over the Mastodon side of the Fediverse, shouldn’t be too hard to find with a quick search. I’m not at my pc atm so cbf using a phone to find some links sorry.
The controversy was about Kagi using search API from Brave, whose CEO is supposedly homophobic. Not Kagi’s CEO himself being homophobic.
Brave Search works really well for me, and they have AI responses at the top of the page now that are really good.
Not sure why you got downvoted like crazy, but Brave legitimately has a great search engine. It also uses its own crawlers unlike DDG, Startpage or Kagi who are really just meta search engines piggybacking off other companies’ results.
