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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no mention of kagi yet? Son, I am disappoint.
They are high thinking people will pay $5/mo for search AND being limited to 300 searches/mo. I avoid subscriptions at all cost, so if I were ever to consider paying for search it would need to be a completely forgettable number like .99/mo.
you are still paying for search, you just don’t know it (yet).
It’s not lost on me, I get it, don’t pretend like you’re the only one who understands how advertising works on the Internet. That’s the agreement with anything you don’t directly pay for. The fee that Kago is asking for is unreasonable in my opinion.
sure, we all value things differently. For me this subscription is nothing but a rounding error.
Oh yikes, I have to do a lot of searches as part of my job (software developer). I would be through that quota ridiculously quickly. It looks like they have a $10/month tier one up from there with unlimited searches and some extra features, though.
If you are not paying for it you are not the customer but the product.
Due to how important search is, it is not a stable solution to place the trust of the technology, your data privacy, and fair pricing to a corporation. Kagi so far seems great don’t get me wrong! But enshitification from monetary incentives almost always occur. Open source search is the only stable long term solution.
Isn’t Yandex Russian?
I agree with the person who identified that ChatGPT is better than a search-engine, but you have to check it, because, unlike a normal search-engine, the ai-engine, itself sometimes produces disinformaiton, instead of only linking-to disinformation.
Checking is now required in both cases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Metasearch_engines
for some alternatives, btw.
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Thanks! Search results have recently been so bad that I found Yandex sometimes offers better results than Duckduckgo/Google/Bing etc. It’s quite sad actually
I personally use https://startpage.com, although I’m definitely gonna try out some of the ones recommended on this post!
I found that no general purpose search engine will ever serve my needs. Their goal is to index the entire internet (or a very large subset of it), and sadly, a very large part of the internet is garbage I have no desire to see. So I simply stopped using search engines. I have a carefully curated, topical list of links from where I can look up information from, RSS feeds, and those pretty much cover all what I used search for.
Lately, I have been experimenting with YaCy, and fed it my list of links to index. Effectively, I now have a personal search engine. If I come across anything interesting via my RSS feeds, or via the Fediverse, I plug it into YaCy, and now its part of my search library. There’s no junk, no ads, no AI, no spam, and the search result quality is stellar. The downside is, of course, that I have to self-host YaCy, and maintain a good quality index. It takes a lot of effort to start, but once there’s a good index, it works great. So far, I found the effort/benefit ratio to be very much worth it.
I still have a SearxNG instance (which also searches my YaCy instance too, with higher weight than other sources) to fall back to if I need to, but I didn’t need to do that in the past two months, and only two times in the past six.
Do yourself a favor and try kagi.com.
And how would that improve anything? Like I said, any general purpose engine is a no-go for me, because they index things I have no desire to ever see in my search results. Kagi is no exception.
Been there, tried it, didn’t find it noticably better than the other general purpose search engines.
Well I’m not going to argue with you. I’m just saying that kagi has a lot of customizations of search that let you tailor it to your needs.
When you’re not ad-focused you don’t care if the client blocks instagram.com, facebook.com from results.
oooh, wiby got a .org? nice.
I don’t know about self-hosted search yet, but I think that’s one place where federation might actually be a feature and not overhead.
Wiby is great! I love using it to discover sites. It’s very similar to spirit of search engines from the early internet. Though it’s not a general search engine it has its specialized uses so I thought I’d mention it
DDG, SearXNG, and occasionally Phind. DDG is my default search engine now.
I don’t know if there’s a “best” amongst these. They each do a job, but they turn up different results. “Best” is the one that lets me avoid Google or Bing. Sometimes I’m forced back to Google, but that’s getting rarer.
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I find my self-hosted searxng pretty okay compared to others. It aggregates most of the time everything I need without the AI, bots generate crap, unecessary noise… Sometimes there are some little search bugs, but It’s foss and free of charge without beeing bombarded with ads, SEO and other braindumping crap !
What you guys think about mojeek?
biased but i think they’re doing just swell (and getting better by the day) ;)
Kagi
I hate to say it but I’ve taken to doing a lot of common searches with bard instead. It is a different experience but more interactive and easier to refine. It gets stuff wrong but compared to a basic Google search Bard is more useful.
I feel like Google is just a directory for looking up web sites now.
I use Firefox + Brave. Not for everyone, but I appreciate that it keeps the modern browser look without all the edge/chrome spam.
Are you talking about Brave Search?
No I use the Firefox browser with the brave search engine
These are not search engines.
Brave has a browser and a search engine. I use the search engine with the Firefox browser.
