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Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
DuckDuckGo
I used to have to put !g (redirect to Google) on like half my searches to get the results I wanted. These days, I actually generally prefer DDG's results over Google's.
I've begun to pay for Kagi.com
I wouldn't say that it "blows my mind" or anything, but simply that it seems to work as expected (which is more than what I can say for Google). There's also a "Fediverse" button on Kagi.com, so it can search lemmy.world (and more??).
I'm just annoyed by the regions issues, you'll get pretty biased results depending in what region you select.
If you try to search for something specific to a region with other selected you'll find sometime empty results, which shows you won't get relevant results about a search if you don't properly select the region.
Probably this is more obvious with non technical searches, for example my default region is canada-en and if I try "instituto nacional electoral" I only get a wiki page, an international site and some other random sites with no news, only when I change the region I get the official page ine.mx and news. For me this means kagi hides results from other regions instead of just boosting the selected region's ones.
Yeah that drives me nuts too. Shopping results for fuckin Home Depot? I'm in Europe you stupid search engine
Their scumbag CEO really soured kagi for me
Explain? I haven't heard anything negative
I am not affiliated with the writer in any way.
This is one person rambling about stuff she's hypothesising
"They didn't pay sales tax for the first couple of years"
Do you even know how small businesses get off the ground in Europe? Possibly by being exempt from taxes until their profits are high enough?
Says their financial information is impossible to find, then starts telling us exactly what that information is
This is the same as people watching a YouTube channel and just assuming it's gospel because they watch that channel a lot smh
I don't get why "scumbag".
The blogger shitted on his company, and refuse to hear any explanation from the CEO, if anything, I find him very patient.
Searxng
Searxng.
Kagi. I like it
I just started using this and am still in the trial period but I will definitely be paying for it when my 100 free searches are gone. So many top results are exactly what I'm looking for. I can't believe my expectations have been conditioned to the point where this surprises me...
I’ve heard enough bad things about it to stay well away. Which is too bad bc it’s quite good atm! I just expect it to hoover up my data & get enshittified sooner than later & the CEO is Musk-level BSer 🤷♂️👍
What have you heard and where? I've not seen anything that indicates either of those things
I don't know about beefbot, but this blog convinced me to not use kagi:
Oh really? I never felt like that was convincing in any way especially since lot of the stuff in that blog is just uninformed (for example you don't have to pay taxes in many jurisdictions until you hit a certain threshold)
I'm not gonna try to convince you to use Kagi, but I just don't feel like that blog is full of good reasons not to.
I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.
I use my own self hosted SearXNG.
Same, it's super simple with Docker and you don't even need to fiddle with ports or anything. I should probably try running it at my work PC now that I think of it.. Anyway, duckduckgo has been good to me for all these years.
DuckDuckGo as a default with Google as fallback depending on what I'm looking for. For lemmy the default search of my instance works well enough so haven't tried external engines.
Pro tip: if you add !g to your search results in DuckDuckGo, it returns Google results
Same. I have had particularly poor results on image searches from duckduckgo. It's on par or superior to Google for general web searches, but man, Google image search is still better
Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.
Theoretical search: "slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie"
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever "celebrities" have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.
The first result on Kagi search is this list which shows the movie years in parentheses so you can easily skip through just the ones from the 1980s. The other search results are more about the gag itself - first use of it by Charlie Chaplin, etc.
I'm mainly using duckduckgo for 7 years now. If I can't find something with it, I try startpage, which sometimes helps.
I run my own searxng instance. It's amazing.
I also spun up my own yacy instance. It was pretty terrible. It could be good, but you would need a pretty beefy machine with a lot of storage and a lot of time for it to index for it to be anything approaching good.
Kagi. I haven't had a failed search results in months, and when I do google can't find it either so I haven't lost anything.
Kagi
Yesterdsy I stumbled over this: www.mojeek.com Apparently has its own index.
Google. I usually find what I want with it, although it has gotten worse over time.
I tried DDG a few years ago and only found it worse. Like, there was a clear performance impact with me using DDG vs me using Google.
Same. Once every few months I give DDG another try for a week or two, but between their strictly inferior and more spam riddled results and the absolutely grotesquely bad Apple Maps they integrate, it's back to Google pretty quickly.
It's like that study found out: Yeah, Google results have objectively gotten worse. But so have Bing's and by extension DDG's, and more so than Google's.
startpage.com or duckduckgo.
Recently started using startpage and it seems pretty decent.
I'm using Kagi. I find that it does a better job at finding "legitimate" sites rather than blogspam and content marketing. However I'm not sure I will stick with it a long time. I seems like it has mostly stalled and the team is getting distracted by making a browser, non-relevant AI (I have no problem with the few AI experiments tied to searching) and other side projects. We'll see. I really hope that they pull themselves together and focus or it might not last. But for now they seem like one of the better options available.
Bing's new "Deep Search" where it has some sort of LLM refinement iteration process has also been helpful sometimes. Probably the best AI search product I have seen, but definitely doesn't replace most searches for me.
Since you mentioned not knowing if this is the right community. For any question where you dont know where it goes [email protected] usually catches everything. Theres also some other question coms at [email protected] and [email protected] but theyre more specific. I can leave this one here though, its fine (especially since theres a bunch of info here now)
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
Source: https://metager.org/lang
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And has other useful features, for example:
That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.
Source: https://metager.org/tips
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
I'm avoiding the major search engines. If I really need a search engine, I use DuckDuckGo. Most of the time, search forms of a few websites provide better results. I've bookmarked search forms of e.g. wikipedia, Wiktionary, the python docs, Arch Linux wiki, github, dict.leo.org, bug trackers of software I commonly use (such as Mozilla's bug tracker) and so on. I'm basically using Firefox's "keyword" search feature in the way DuckDuckGo's !bang syntax works.