Fact: 90% of science is made with quartz

... accurate

Kagi is meant to be okay, but it’s paid.

There’s also SearX which you could self host.

https://scholar.google.com/ hasn't been quite as enshittified

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now, and I never went back to Google. Maybe give it a try !

The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it's written by a human (LLMs).

I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.

If they'd present you with all that spam content, you wouldn't find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it's written by a human, they're going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.

There's also at least some measurements, that search results are decidedly getting worse: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/

So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse...

Presenting to the emergency room with hyponatremia, from hypo meaning low, natron meaning sodium, and hemia meaning presence in blood. Low sodium presence in blood !

What if I'm bleeding out from a gunshot wound and I have a crystal that is sufficient diameter to plug said gunshot wound?

To be fair; pretty common.

Same experience I have had. Swapping to scholar gets me relevant results that aren't filled with ai gibberish and backwater Hokum. Still have to be careful about study sizes and sigma values and applicability, but miles ahead for at least getting to that being my issue.

Brave uses its own index. It used to be supplemented with results from other engines but I believe they have now phased that out.

Brave is the best of the free options in my experience, and it supports "bangs" which let's you send your querry to a different engine (typing "how far is it to the sun !g" will pass the search to google. Duckduckgo also supports bangs), this is especially helpful for image searches (!gi for google images) since braves image search sucks dogshit 😅

Quant seemed like the second best free option in my experience. Some people don't like brave as a company for various reasons, so quant may be a good option for those folks. Its my understanding that Mozilla has worked with quant in some way, which is kinda neat.

Both have their own index making them a sustainable/viable option going forward, where meta search engines that use other engine's results are at the whim of those they fetch the results from (but may provide better results by piggybacking off a larger successful engine)

Ecosia uses the money they generate with ads to plant trees 🌿 (I think it's bing on the backend)

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:

https://metager.org/tor

It is open source:

https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer

And has other useful features, for example:

[...] 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:

https://searx.space

Brave Search does not use Google and Bing. And why did you skip over DDG?

Qwant was good until they georestricted it for no reason

Hell, typing in "scientific data about minerals" gets me a bunch of university geology department websites.

I’ve commented about potential Kagi astroturfing here before.

Seems likely to me.

Their trial - too short for me - felt like a private Google w/improvements.

Now, as a filthy freeloader, my default is DuckDuckGo. I am dissatisfied with the results and !bang out to Google (!g) about half the time. I pray DDG makes use of this data to improve their engine.

tl;dr astroturfing vs. bad results vs. enabling the king of adware

Gosh I need to set up SearXNG! Also “private Google” vibes. Instances here

I know right? Completely ruin geology.

Could be Québécois . They put the dollar sign after the number, rather than before if I recall.