Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn’t see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?
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Does anyone care to explain the possible reason for downvoting this - is there something I am not aware of wrt DDG?
DuckDuckGo
I use DDG too. When I redirect to google using !g it’s usually out of desperation and it gives me the same bad results in a slightly different order.
I use this on my phone. It’s gotten pretty great!
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…
Yea it hasn’t disappointed me so far, I’m also still in the trial, been waiting for a search that turns crap results on G and DDG to try and put it through the paces. Though compared to G it is nice not having half the results be sponsored.
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
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.
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.
Somehow I’ve never heard of searxng before. Would you say it’s better than DDG? Are the memory requirements not too high?
Searxng is a search engine aggregator. It sends your search out to all the engines and aggregates the results. No ads, no bullshit, endlessly customizable.
You can use one of the public instances. You don’t have to run your own.
I’m mainly using duckduckgo for 7 years now. If I can’t find something with it, I try startpage, which sometimes helps.
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.
slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie
DDG results weren’t too bad, although repetitious and focused on the history of the gag, and not particular examples.
I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.
Ecosia. These days it’s better than Google.
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A combination of SearXNG and Stract, for the most part. They’re definitely not perfect (yet), but they mostly get the job done! And I think they both have a lot of cool filters and refinement settings that I haven’t even taking advantage of so far.
For niche stuff it seems like a lot of hyper targeted search engines are popping up, like Sepia Search for PeerTube.
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this is correct 😀
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Since you mentioned not knowing if this is the right community. For any question where you dont know where it goes !no_stupid_questions@programming.dev usually catches everything. Theres also some other question coms at !cs_career_questions@programming.dev and !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev but theyre more specific. I can leave this one here though, its fine (especially since theres a bunch of info here now)
Kagi.
I know, I know… I just really like it.
Really? I tried the trial and didn’t find it that much better than DDG… Specially not $10 a month for life better
I found it slightly better. I also find the entire user experience appealing, so that adds some points. I use web search dozens of times a day for work, so it’s worth it for me.
I probably would go back to 100% DDG if I stop working in tech.
Kagi
