this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
88 points (98.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36179 readers
757 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

we all know Google's usefulness has diminished if you're searching for something the algorithm doesn't have it's nose on, personally i don't feel searxng (i used the nicfab.eu one) gives the best or most useful results either, what's out there?

all 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] sneezelord 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Woah perplexity is awesome! They even have an iOS app. Thanks for the recommendation

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

It's a good 'un.

[–] zahel 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Been using duckduckgo for years and generally gets the job done. If I want more local specific results then I'll just add !g to my search which'll do a Google search

[–] lagomorphlecture 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Duck Duck Go is literally just Bing without the personal data. If it works for you then it works for you, but it's good to know what you're really using.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

from wikipedia: DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.[62][3][63][64][53] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.[64][65]

[–] zahel 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm quite aware of that fact. Not sure where I gave the impression otherwise. When it comes down to it, pretty much all the options are just proxies/aggregators for other search engines - that introduce privacy.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Seconding Kagi. The pricing model is a little rough, but if you're serious about getting the most out of a search engine, Kagi is the way to go.

Imo, paying is worth it to be completely free of Google's services.

[–] MildManneredPate 4 points 2 years ago

Kagi is great but I feel they’ll struggle with their current pricing. I have a discounted rate for their pro tier, $10 for 1500 queries, and I think even that is expensive.

[–] solidsnake2085 2 points 2 years ago

Never heard of it but they have a free trial I am testing out for now.

[–] solidsnake2085 1 points 2 years ago

Never heard of it but they have a free trial I am testing out for now.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I know DuckDuckGo has its own issues, but surely it’s better than Google at least?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Results wise it’s just a bing wrapper. Which is not all that good in all honesty.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Ever since Microsoft nuked it a couple years back (because results included csam) search has been heavily restricted and most definitely was shot in the ankle, used to use bing a lot to find older resources for stuff I needed, now I cannot use it for that any longer

[–] DARbarian 7 points 2 years ago

searx.be is my favorite by far. You can get results from DDG, Brave, Startpage, etc. all in one place and it's self-hostable

[–] Jackhammer_Joe 6 points 2 years ago

DuckDuckGo works in 98% of the time for me. If I can't find something on DDG, I'll switch to Google. But that's only rarely needed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

duckduckgo is the most useful and straightforward to use, brave isn't bad either although it struggles with non english searches from my experience. searx is powerful but a bit overkill and it is not the most intuitive

oh there is also startpage if you want google results but don't want to use google, it does not allow vpns though

[–] Smokeydope 5 points 2 years ago

I like the paulgo.io searxng instance for most queries its fine. As for truly novel search engines that dont just scrape google, theres search.marginalia.nu and yacy.net

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago
[–] MusketeerX 3 points 2 years ago

Great discussion.

Because it's happened gradually I've just gotten used to Google being less and less useful.

It's good to try something else.

This thread made me try Perplexity, Kagi and SearXNG. I'll give them all a run over the next week or so and see how they go.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I use Yandex when I suspect Google isn’t telling me everything.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I like Ecosia.

It does run on Bing, but I like seeing the lil tree planting counter (⁠•⁠‿⁠•⁠)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

eh, i've been doing a mix of duckduckgo or brave's search engine. tbh it works for basic things but i've yet to find a better search engine for more niche or specific queries

[–] cousinofjah 1 points 2 years ago

swurl.com is a fun take on search aggregators

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

i always hear duckduck in these threads. though im still trapped in google land.

[–] app_priori 1 points 2 years ago

I use Bing for Microsoft Rewards. You can get the equivalent of $10 a month in gift cards for your searches.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I miss the days of Alta Vista that could do searches with Boolean logic. DuckDuckGo is probably the most popular alternative.