thethrilloftime69What search engine do you guys use?
https://feddit.online/c/asklemmy/p/1490284/what-search-engine-do-you-guys-use
DominusOfMegadeusKagi. I knowmit gets trash talked for several, reasons, but I’ve used ecosia, duckduckgo, and now I’m back to, Kagi. I just like it better all around.
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.)
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 make me a “2x programmer” due to their good results.
If I had no money left, I would try SearXNG.
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.
For programming questions why not use an LLM? The days of googling 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.
Depends how you use LLMs. I didn’t say use LLM to solve the problem, I have it breakdown the documentation and make it easier to read.
Stackoverflow also has incorrect answers always marked as correct and is t a great source to learn from, the best way to learn is just reading documentation and having breakpoints to read the data coming in.
TrustedTyrantMostly DuckDuckGo but I do want get kagi at some point. I’ve also been trying searxng self hosted but I want to use it more before I judge it since I probably still need to tweak some settings.
MwaI use Qwant. Works great for everything I want it to do. Or ecosia if im on safari.
AceFuzzLordIf I had the money, I would at the very least try Kagi, but for now I’m just surfing with DuckDuckGo using their “noai(dot)duckduckgo(dot)com” link. Auto turns off their dumb “duck ai” nonsense and using their filters to try and hide genAI images.
I also looked it up because I was curious and if the source is correct, I learned that the “noai” part of that link is a subdomain.
hoagecko (he/his)The only independent search engines that support my native Japanese are Google, Bing, Brave, and Yep.
Of these, I generally search using Brave, and if I’m not satisfied with the results, I search again using DuckDuckGo.
I don’t use Yep because of its strict bot restrictions.
Also, on the rare occasions when I need to do an exact match or a search using site:, for some reason, Brave and DuckDuckGo are useless, so I reluctantly use Google, which is a shame.
As someone living in Japan, I do not recommend QWant, which is recommended in this comment section.
As I’ve commented before, this is because the service geoblocks countries that have non-Western languages as their official languages.
cally [he/they]I’m brazilian, our official language is Portuguese, and Qwant is not available here either. It seems they don’t understand that people can speak two or more languages? They could just put an “English-only results” warning, but ok.
same for korea, qwant used to work but they seemed to have blocked access around 2023 or so
Jo Miran
daggermoonI use Startpage, everything else kind of sucks imo.
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.
Right now I alternate between DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. Google results have been getting worse and the forcing of AI summaries was the final straw for me to stop using even the !g shortcut in DDG. At least DDG let’s you disable them.
searxng (self hosted). But I understand not everyone can host something. There are public instances out there as well.
But if you’re self hosting it doesn’t it mean your IP address is being exposed to all other search engines used by Searxng including to Google?
Yes, but my search data doesn’t leave my house. Also since my IP changed multiple times a week (not quite daily, but close), I prefer this to using someone else’s instance. There is some obfuscation to be gained by searching through a public insurance as well, but my insurance is still used by multiple people, not just me.
What do you mean with search data not leaving your house? I mean if you hit Google a request for a search, then Google automatically knows what your IP address is searching for, isn’t?
ambitiousslabI’m quite crazy:
- Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
- Good for finding technical stuff, and sometimes recipes! I often find cool blogs this way.
- SearxNG via farside.link
- Unfortunately (and understandably) many of these sites use Anubis now, so I have to turn on JavaScript, and thanks to Google’s ratelimits the results are either fantastic or not helpful at all
- But, the public instances can work, so I try with 3 instances before moving on
Depending on the thing I’m searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that’s as good:
- Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata
- Some other wikis
- Lemmy (of course!)
- Peertube and podcast indexes
- Websites of grocery shops near me
Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.
I’d quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It’d be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I’m doing manually, use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.
Marginalia Search
search.marginalia.nu is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.
DDG performance has dropped for me. I use a mix of their app and Firefox loaded with a searxng.
Works like old Google, No ads, tends to reduce SEO sloop that DDG is susceptible to.
WildmimicI’m using Metager - you pay a very small amount per search, the amount is defined by which indexes and options you configure to use. It’s pretty cheap - I loaded up 10€ a few months ago and still have about 2/3 left. There is also the option to use completely anonymous tokens to “pay” for your searches, which uses a little bit more of your balance, but can’t be tied back to your account. Search settings are saved only locally using the browser extension.
At home I use startpage. I find much better than ddg.
At work i use
Because Im working with a MS product at work, sometimes Bing get better results when I search for something very specific work related.
CerebralHawksI use DDG on everything, even the work PC. It works well enough for my purposes. I don’t even hate duck.ai and it can be useful, but I’ll double check anything I take from it.
Yes, I think DDG is actually being quite reasonable with its AI integrations so I have nothing against it and would rather have it than not.
Scott 🇨🇦🏴☠️Duck no AI version
I use Qwant and Ecosia.
Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.
For those who don’t know, most “independent” search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they’re still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.
Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they’re collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they’re already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.
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.
parzivaleTools and DDG, sometimes google/startpage. I’m surprised how little known eTools is.
pewgar_seemsimandroidi personally use ecosia
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.
spez- Independent unlike DDG and other
- Parity with google for search results
- Actually good AI integration where it never hallucinates and only summarizes the sources it encounters
- Great integration of wikipedia, stackoverflow etc. into search results
- Great UI
clubb
brimfieldI use StartPage, but I keep an eye on Marginalia. It finds sites that other search engines miss.
Marginalia Search
Marginalia Search is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.
Brave is decent! I struggles with looking g for smaller local results sometimes. Like you really have to specify the town/cities for small businesses and stuff. Which I suppose is good. That probably means it’s not creeping on your location constantly
starlingukQuite a lot of the time. It’s pretty damn awful, actually.
Mesa