Mastodawn

okay so what search engine DO you use, right now, by default, in your browser?

Google

9.9%

DDG

57%

Kagi

10.5%

Other

22.6%

Poll ended at May 28 at 11:26am.

Jeezy Peeps May 27

@halcy firefox was defaulting mine to fucking yahoo for some reason, which is wild bc i generally default to DDG or google depending on the machine i'm using

Sean Lynch May 28

@colon_three @halcy

Just a guess, but did you set Firefox to no ai?

DDG is ai by default, but has a no ai page.

Yanik Magnan May 27

@halcy been on duckduckgo for ages, the results kinda suck (especially for Japanese) but the !bang shortcuts to redirect searches to other more specific sites (mainly Wikipedia, YouTube, RemyWiki, specific language API docs, etc…) more than make up for it imo

always felt super fishy about Kagi so never bothered with it and feel proven right for doing so. tempted to just run my own personal search instead of all these clowns, I feel like I know elasticsearch well enough to do something reasonable for personal scale

@sakurina for me, I did after using DDG for a long time eventually try out Kagi and am happy enough with the results and/or not bothered enough by the Weirdo Behaviour that I maintain the sub, for now (especially since google has just gotten... worse and worse)

Mia ‘Meetings? I Abstain’ Luna Tearmoon May 27

@sakurina @halcy one more scraper will fix it? w

@halcy Other. I tried some SearXNG instances in the last months, but it seems I have to install my own instance, as the results are often in Chinese. Until then it seems I have to return to DDG.

Elvith Ma'for May 27

@atarifrosch @halcy that's usually caused by Bing. If your used instances allow you to switch to another backend, you should get better results

@elvith @atarifrosch this feels like really useful information

Aurin Azadî

@elvith @halcy Thank you, I'll try.

Roknrol May 27

@halcy Qwant on my phone and Startpage on my computer. I haven't decided which one to stick with yet...Startpage results are pretty good, but I don't know where they get the results from. Qwant is France based and they scrape their own data for their database, but it does tend to be a bit slow and often there's too much traffic for my initial request.

breaque May 27

@halcy Kagi, sadly. I know they're evil, but the results and especially the features for site ranking/blocking are so nice it's hard to go back.

@breaque yeah the site rating is what does it for me (and google, the next best alternative, being, well. bad. it might actually be on par or worse on search quality now for most of what I want, which feels like conspiracy board crazy talk, and yet.)

kepstin May 27

@breaque @halcy yeah, a specific issue I've hit with DDG is that while they do allow you to block sites from results, as far as I can tell it only gets saved in your local browser storage. So it's not saved permanently, and not e.g. synced to your phone. Not sure if there's a good privacy preserving way to deal with that.

Michael K May 27

@breaque @halcy yeah, i've used kagi for 3 years and agree 100% with this :)

Didier Malenfant May 27

@nifta @breaque @halcy just curious, what makes them evil?

breaque May 28

@didier @nifta @halcy Pushing "AI" slop, paying Yandex and Elon with no way for the user to opt out.

Cairo Braga May 27

@halcy I have my own SearXNG instance that I use by default on all my devices and browsers, and my backup is NOAI DDG (https://noai.duckduckgo.com).

DuckDuckGo - Protection. Privacy. Peace of mind.

The Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs.

DuckDuckGo

@halcy Startpage

@halcy ecosia

@halcy as an other™️ voter:
- i like, from non-self-hosted (so far):
- marginalia
- mumbl
- self hosted:
- yacy all the way. it's pretty much my default whenever i can run it on my laptop

@halcy Ecosia

@halcy
+1 for Ecosia

@crispius @halcy @EdwinG me too.

BedastGPT May 27

@halcy I use SearxNG, though I don't really push it on folks because it's a self-host thing, and I feel like pushing it is like "just install linux!" Rather, I tend to suggest Startpage. It's what I'll go to if, for some reason, I'm having issues with my SearxNG instance.

unkx May 27

@halcy I answered DDG but to be honest whenever I need less transient information that’s not specific to some tool or technology i actually use Wikipedia. My phone’s browser has about 200 tabs open at any given time and about half of those are Wikipedia pages.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)May 27

@unkx @halcy

DDG's !w helper is great for that!

unkx May 27

@david_chisnall @halcy why would i use a search engine to search a website that has it’s own search box?

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)May 27

@unkx @halcy

Because your browser's search box goes there, so you don't have to first navigate to the web page and then enter the search.

Same reason I use !fman to go FreeBSD man pages: it's less typing than going to the FreeBSD web site first.

unkx May 27

@david_chisnall @halcy why would i willingly divulge to DDG or my browser what i search on Wikipedia?

Also: ”navigating to the webpage” on my phone (or pc) is faster for me than doing any of that other stuff. I only need to type one letter to the address bar and thanks to the magic of autocomplete i’m then one key press away from wikipedia.

Caden May 27

@david_chisnall @unkx @halcy on many browsers you can also add a search engine with a shortcut. For instance, I can search Wikipedia directly from my browser's address bar by typing "@wp search-term" and as a bonus it's much faster than DDG and customizable

Florian 'floe' Echtler May 27

@halcy https://noai.ddg.com saves a bunch of water and nerves

Maggie Pie 🇦🇺🇺🇸 🚫AI May 27

Annelies May 27

@halcy noaiduckduckgo.com

noai.duckduck.go

@halcy Startpage

@halcy noai.duckduckgo.com

cuan_knaggs May 27

@magpieluvseeds @halcy this

@halcy ecosia here

@halcy I'm currently using Qwant in all my devices. If a search proves to be especially tricky I've been falling back to Ecosia, although their AI-by-default push is discouraging me and making me look for an alternative.

AlexTECPlayz May 27

@halcy DDG for web searches, otherwise I have added a shit ton of websites that support search parameters as search engines on FF. Wikipedia, YouTube, YouTube Music, Google Play Store, Steam, GitHub, SteamDB, MDN, Debian Manpages, Godot Docs, and so on.

I hide websites (and their associated content such as photos, videos) using uBlacklist which also works on Google, Ecosia, SearXNG, and you can add your own as well if needed.

@halcy DDG-noAI

@halcy Other:

Self-hosted Hister, which fails back to

Self-hosted SearXNG, and I fail back to

Ecosia.

Common Sparrow May 27

@halcy
Startpage, with all the privacy options enabled.

alexandra catalina May 27

@halcy google udm 14

V'ger May 27

@halcy Currently: Qwant

@halcy Start Page

@halcy oh wow, I didn't realize ddg was that popular among weird nerds

@noiob ddg is extremely easy to switch to because it's free and also it's like. fine. and you have a quick google fallback if you need to. but still the degree that googles mindshare at least on here is gone goes pretty hard.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

Glitchy Pixel May 27

@halcy
I use DDG. Specifically the No AI version.

Its not perfect, or even great, but is better than Google and the forced on AI crap by all means.

But another one that is actually pretty nice is marginalia search. Which is pretty awesome:

https://marginalia-search.com/

I've heard good things from Mojeek, but haven't used it.

DuckDuckGo - Protection. Privacy. Peace of mind.

The Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs.

DuckDuckGo

@halcy brave

@halcy I used DDG for more than a decade, and the results eventually became unusable until I prefixed almost every search with !g. Eventually, I switched to Kagi a few years ago, but in the last few months I feel like quality has also gotten worse.

@worr I feel conversely that Kagi has gotten a bit better for me (and Google has gotten so much worse that I !g increasingly rarely, usually if I'm looking for some verbatim phrase that I know should be somewhere but Kagi didnt surface it)

I wonder where the divergent impressions come from. For me I guess a lot is I've downrated and uprated pages to customize and this is helping me a lot (recipes from the site I know is good, No Fucking Wikia Or Pinterest Ever, stuff like that)

Will Orr May 27

@halcy I use the downranking a lot as well tbh.

The failure mode that I tend to see personally, is that I'll search for something (arguably something more obscure, this isn't the common case by any means), and I'll get two pages of barely-related results and then nothing. The sites themselves aren't low-quality, but the problem is that they're just not related enough to what I was searching.

Duck duck go no ai

@halcy I've been using StartPage, DuckDuckGo, and currently trying out Mojeek as default in one browser. I got a Grokipedia link as a result in Mojeek and the results often aren't what I'm looking for so probably not going to try it out much longer. Might try out Qwant soon, just to see.