I just make a post in NoStupidQuestions and use y'all like a search engine. :P
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Posting a wrong answer is a good way to get the right answer in a reply!
Ah, Murphy's law
You're thinking of Godwin's Law
Got 'em
Almost got me!
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DuckDuckGo on Firefox. If you truly want to de-google your life avoid Chrome and Chromium based browsers like Edge and Brave
I'm out of the loop on DDG, what did they do?
Not sure on the shady part, but I have stopped using them simply because they give me the same crap as Bing. Web search is almost dead, I’ve been thinking of trying one of the paid options. I’ve read good things about kagi
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Half a dozen people in here already mentioned it, but Kagi has completely changed the search game and changed the way I use the Internet. It's like an old school search engine with modern conveniences like a chat bot and summarizer, but without the ads and other shenanigans.
Ugh, paid. In this economy!?
It's either your wallet or your personal information...
A surprisingly and insanely expensive to run and manage a search engine that isn't just a reskin on bing (DDG). Even more so when you can't mine your users for data.
Kagei is doing really good stuff and the quality of results I get are much higher. The $10/m is it easily paid off within even a day or two's use in my normal job. Never mind all the personal research that I do.
Is a different model that is a not providing you with the best results that you are looking for. As opposed to steering you towards ads or towards partnerships. I like it.
I totally get the sentiment of saying when you pay you are not the product, however... what does any company stop from still collecting data anyway? I know that the kagi people deny that but why should anyone trust that.
Companies have fucked customers/consumers over so much, there is no trusting anyone when it comes to data collection. It is just so easy. Even if they don't use it right now, why not just collect it anyway.
So, while I'd love to pay a little bit to support a service like that, I am so jaded by how dishonest companies have been about stuff like that, that I am not really willing to also give them money in addition.
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I know, that was my reaction at first too. But I tried it for a month and honestly it's an amazing search engine. If it helps you to know, when you search they also use the (paid) search APIs of other search engines and aggregate the results in a way to get something better than any individual engine - so your searches actually have a decent marginal cost for them.
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https://kagi.com no ads, great results. It’s $5 a month but worth it imo
Seconding. Kagi is the only one that was able to replace Google for me.
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Firefox allowed you to define the default search and have many many engines listed. That's been a standard feature for many years.
even simpler – Firefox will auto-detect a lot of search engines – right-click in the search/address bar and if Firefox can detect it, bottom option will be to add that engine to your list
I'm pretty sure most browsers can. Pretty sure OP's complaint's a big misplaced on that one.
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Kagi. Nothing else even comes close. Kagi is what Google used to be, before they decided they'll show you whatever is profitable, rather than what they know you're looking for.
Not sure I'm ready to pay for search especially not at $5-10/mo.
Yep. Like $1.99 or $2.99 I can easily justify but $5/mo for only 300 searches feels too steep to me reguardless of result quality. I'll just go through the other pages of results from any other search engine.
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I use SearXNG. It is a meta search engine so it use results from various other search engines and you can specify which with !. It does the job for me.
My favourite feature is that you can host it yourself, you can even set it up to search over tor or VPN if you're super privacy conscious.
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Honestly I feel like searxng is way better than it gets credit for. It clearly isn’t as powerful as google but it isn’t drowning in SEO crap so that difference is entirely negated and then some.
I've been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding "deep" results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don't at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.
Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I'll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don't want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.
Kagi is by far the best search engine I've ever used. It is paid though.
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The best I've found is Mojeek. The results take some getting used to because we're all used to Google's fuckery, but I've been using it for months, and it's quite good.
There's also SearXNG, though I'm not sure if that fits your needs. A couple public instances I've liked are:
Random SearX Redirector – basically just that, sends your search to a random working SearXNG instance
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Kagi.com
Duckduckgo if you use a vpn, everyone else throws speedbumos at VPN users... Prove your a human...
Meta search engines:
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SearX
Open source, self hostable meta search engine.
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SearXNG
Better version of SearX. A list of SearX and SearXNG instances is available at https://searx.space
Also meta search engines, but different:
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DuckDuckGo
It's very privacy friendly, but it gets all the search results from Microsoft's Bing.
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Startpage
Basically the same thing but it uses Google results. They are really focused on privacy too, they even are on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@StartpageSearch
They're based in the EU (Netherlands) so they are also subject to the GDPR.
Independent:
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Brave Search
They recently stopped using Google and Bing and created their own search index. It appears to be privacy friendly, but the company behind Brave is not ideal.
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Mojeek
A small privacy focused search engine, that uses its own index. They're also on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@Mojeek
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Kagi
I've seen many many people recommend it, but I have never really used it myself. It's not free, they charge $5/month for 300 searches and $10 for unlimited searches.
Been using Qwant for maybe a year or so. Recently found Swisscows too. I am not sure if Qwant uses their own index. I remember that they said that they were to create their own index, but the results looks suspiciously similar to Bing. Swisscows for sure runs their own index, and I find the results to be rather good
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Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a “default search engine” that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.
Which browsers don't? I think this one can likely be chalked up to user error.
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