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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I find all the kagi mentions to be very suspicious
If I had stock/investments in a search engine, you better fucking believe Id also have a bunch of bots crawling for the terms “What is the best search engine” and immediately hijack the convo with bots upvoting my search engine.
I cannot explain how easy it is to do this.
Your comment belongs higher. When given the opportunity to make money by social media advertising sometimes in the thousands or millions, companies, share holders, and conflict of interest groups take it. Cablemod’s burning adapters, cryptocurrency scams, payed positive youtube reviews are some great examples. In general there is no honor system and its best to assume anything that can be abused will.
Also manipulating votes is incredibly effective towards swaying public opinion due to the bandwagon effect. Spend a days worth of effort making fake accounts and downvoting any opinion you see as undesirable and most people will follow suit. This is especially bad in echo chambers like on twitter, reddit, etc.
I wish a broader audience could be aware of this. The best I can do is try to spread the word.
Sources:
- The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc
- Cablemod Recall: https://old.reddit.com/r/cablemod/comments/18o7bnv/planned_voluntary_safety_recall_of_cablemod/
- FTX Scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX
- Bandwagon Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
- Echo Chamber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
I’m glad I’m finally not the only one feeling this way. I’ve been seeing them aggressively pushed seemingly out of the blue for months now. Especially for what is such an awful deal and zero evidence to their claims, just citing the marketing page at face value.
I always fear it comes across that way when I recommend it to people here. I’m just a very happy user and want to see them succeed.
I find it expensive for what it is (given that I still get a limited number of searches) and I’m not comfortable with some of their ways (I don’t want anything to do with AI, and I the idea they have of being nonpolitical seems dangerously naive to me). I also don’t like supporting non-FOSS projects all that much.
Still, it’s the best search I’ve found, and I’m paying every month until I find something better. It’s worth it.
Why? It’s a great search engine that a lot of people find extremely useful.
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.
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.
I believe yahoo killed altvista before google came and finished it off
Altavista was ahead of their time. The modern internet desperately needs a technical search engine.
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 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.
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.
Hmm, I did notice a sudden severe drop in quality recently. Perhaps they are A/B testing something.
ddg has been going downhill for awhile now. they changed something significant a couple years back that just made results, especially after the first half-page, absolute shit.
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.
Google doesn’t do that properly anymore, either, much like the “literal search” (quotes) - used to work, now it’s a crap shoot.
It’s not as bad as Google yet, but I find myself getting terrible or no results quite a few times.
Ex: if I’m looking for a niche blog post from example.com, just entering the keywords doesn’t return the right result, if anything at all. I have to add “site:example.com” and the right link shows up on top.
It’s kinda amusing when this happens, but I keep using ddg anyway because bing and Google had the same issue for the same keywords when I ran into the issue.
It is as useless. After all, it’s just Bing. But if the results are good enough for you, then why bother finding something else.
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.
I think you meant to write ass-driven
I’ve been using Kagi for 3 months now I think? And I’ve found it to be extremely useful for research…to a point, my only real issue is that after the first or so series of results it either doesn’t offer anything further or just no longer is showing relevant results to my search. Honestly though I’ve been very happy with Kagi and continue to pay the 10/month but if I do find something even better I’d happily switch. I’m not married to any particular search engine (well …least not to the extent of using Google services).
If you’re skeptical just give it a try I think they have a trial system in place.
THANK YOU for mentioning startpage! I have not heard of them but I haven’t liked using DDG very much so I’ve begrudgingly using google in private mode (and then I always forget to switch back and forth)
Took wayyy to long to find something not recommending Kagi.
I’ve found duckduckgo works fine for things that aren’t recent.
Controversially the bing gpt chat bot works alarming well.
The bing chat bot scares me a bit. I don’t want to use bing out of principle, but at this point they’re just flirting too damn hard.
DDG is just Bing, so …
Are you a bot?
I self-host a SearXNG instance and it works really well.
Correct answer
Why pay for a search engine? I’m getting tired of Kagi astroturfing
Thank you!
Ooo this looks super interesting
Kagi
Yandex was way better for searches in russian sources, but it came to shit just like google and also excludes whatever russian government don’t like at that point. I searched for some software in it multiple timea and the first link was some noname, probably malware site. It also promotes it’s own malware like browser with questionable russian security sertificates and their own Alexa. I’d honestly not include it in any list.
I like DDG and don’t switch from it that much. I’ve also heard Kagi as paid search engine is good, but I’ve never tried it.
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.
I’ve heard a lot of great things about Kagi, though the search limit and subscription is a little off-putting. A self-hosted Kagi would be amazing though!
Kagi has a free trial, 100 searches for free, so you can try it out and see if you like it or not.
Why would they do all that work to create a better search engine than Google and give it away for free? What is going to pay their bills?
Google pays their bills by selling your data and spying on your searches, not to mention they are morally corrupt. Kagi pays their bills with your monthly sub. Seems a lot better.
I’m worried eventually even Kagi will get enshittified. It has been a common trend that almost always occurs. Open source is the only way to ensure stability. Conflict of interest is what leads to companies either overcharging, or even accepting to get bought out.
Don’t get me wrong, Kagi seems to be a great company thus far! But for something as important as search it would be best to have an open source solution.
Probably they will, but it could take a long time. Valve is still good as an example of a company that managed to not become crap.
Open source is the only way to provide stability? Can you explain more about this?
Valve is great! Private and non-profit organizations give me some hope for a better internet one day.
Regarding Kagi, there are other potential concerns with privacy, data leaks and price gouging as well. The Patriot Act and Snowden’s leaks have shown that companies will lie in their privacy policy to appeal to authorities even if they claim they are not storing information. All your health related searches, sensitive personal details, private life, etc is also always linked to your payment method waiting for a potential data leak if they are lying. (Or a copy is just sent to five eyes)
All that is to say, be wary of trusting your privacy to companies. Monetization is a powerful motivator!
You can pay with bitcoin, which might help keeping the account entirely anonymous for some.
After that power company got blackmailed in the American South and extorted for like 40000 Bitcoin, which they paid…but then within 24 hours the FBI had recovered all of it…which is something no one was supposed to be capable of doing, I’m going to go ahead and say Bitcoin anonymity is compromised.
That means the FBI or DHS has devoted the computational power necessary to track every.single.bitcoin.transaction and then indexed it all well enough to cross reference against metadata.
Bitcoin is as secure as they allow it to be. It’s most likely allowed for the same reason the Tor network is, because it’s an avenue to move resources or information to undercover assets overseas.
At this point, I’ve come to expect that all of the products I like are going to be ruined at some point, so it’s about establishing enough independence to more easily transition to the next service.
Kagi’s great, and I’ll worry about finding a better search engine once it gets worse, but I don’t expect that to happen before my next renewal, so I’m happy.
Plus self hosting an index big enough and fast enough for a useful search engine is ridiculous.
They now have unlimited searches for $10/mo. That’s what got me to try it out.
You are correct though. I really do not like having all of my search history tied to my credit card (and then me). What helps me justify that is that instead of me being the product like google, by paying I’ve become the customer. Hopefully that incentivizes keeping them on the up and up.
I did come across searnxg in this thread. It looks like that can be self hosted so I’m gonna give that a try as well.
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.
I think it’s perfectly understandable that some people are homophobes
No it’s not. It’s not a justifiable position. It’s not unexpected sadly, but it is not understandable because it’s not a position based on anything other than ingrained hatred and fear
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.
No, it is also the Kagi founder as per the Mastodon topics.
I self host a searxng instance and I find the combination of bing, duckduckgo and qwant as the source engines to return decent results. You can use a public instance and choose those engines in settings.
I found public instances often have issues connecting to many search engines at once, will look into self hosting it. Thanks!
I’m specifically looking to replace DDG, they have really dropped in quality lately and are very clearly going back on their word for not having you in a bubble with specific to you results.
This site collects quite a few web search engines: https://www.searchenginemap.com/
Kagi is the highest quality for sure. There isn’t a better one, I have tried all of them except perplexity, and that’s more like chat gpt rather than search.
For everyone who uses searxng, is it great for day to day browsing? Do I require to host my own instance or the setup is as easy as requiring to add “searxng” option on my browser app?
I’m interested to move away from google as it becomes shitty everyday and loses its effectiveness for advanced query (based on my own result compared during 2013 up to pre covid). Bing have weird result on my region so cannot use it, ddg only for occasional use.
Thanks!
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.
The ability to summarize pages directly on the search results page is a big win for me. I also use the kagi summarizer several times a day to summarize youtube videos that I’m interested in but don’t want to sit through the whole video.
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.
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Why pay? I think the answer is pretty easy. If one doesn’t want to self host. Running any kind of web based service costs the person running it money. Google obviously makes money off of a user doing searches via adds and data collection. I would actually have no issue paying for certain Google services if it meant that as a paying customer they would not double dip and try and profit off the data they are collecting on me.
This is all coming from a person who has a server rack in my basement and multiple PCs scattered throughout my home, so I am no stranger to self hosting.
I would actually have no issue paying for certain Google services
Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior, Richard Stallman?
People have spare pc’s or laptops they can sacrifice as a SearxNG instance. I too have a homelab & i have not paid a single penny to have a hobby SearxNG instance on my old hackbook pro that I share with friends.
I feel like, the internet is more than just paying your way for services. It’s about creating and sharing services and decentralization. If Kagi takes off then we have another evil Google that wants to profit at the cost of users, but its name is Kagi. It might be an impractical answer, and it does take some work to create a better internet. End of philosophical rant about the true spirit of the internet
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