Since Internet search has and will change, which search engines do you use successfully, and what are their advantages?
I use DuckDuckGo, I forgot how to live without the search tags such as !yt, !fb, !w to search specific sites.
Startpage, google search results without ads, trackers but much slower, the slowness can get annoying sometimes when my internet speed is bad
I use you.com as it’s centered on an ai chatbot and pulls in traditional web search results to augment it’s answers. it works quite well.
Interesting, is that the only search engine you use? Does it work well when you want to browse different links?
yeah for most of my searches it’s all I need. you.com adds traditional search results in the sidebar if you need them. I do use !g (google) in some cases (usually for a niche specific page I need).
might not count, but I use startpage, which uses google while allegedly keeping none of the info that makes google problematic
sometimes i use duckduckgo,in firefox you can make a shortcut to type anything in any searchbar too, like so: (in this example I’ll use kbin.social search)
We type something into search to get the exact url we need, that ends up being https://kbin.social/search?q=[something]
in this case [something] is obviously what we typed, so we save a bookmark of https://kbin.social/search?q=%s where %s swaps out what we type when we call to the bookmark
Then we give the bookmark a keyword that makes it easy to type, it can be anything but I’ll just use kb
now whenever i type ‘kb somethingsomething’ it will search somethingsomething on kbin.socialI use this for youtube, arch wiki, the type-effectiveness graph on bulbapedia pages ( https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/%s_(Pok%C3%A9mon)#Type_effectiveness ), etc, etc
deleted by creator
I use a searxng instance as-well, one I can host myself. Besides the cool factor of hosting your own personal search engine you can tweak the setting a on a server level as you wish and you know the machine your queries are going to.
When I want to try something AI related I use the Bing AI though, it can pull from multiple search results when giving an answer which is cool.
I have switched to Ecosia few days ago. No conplains so far. Its free, and builds off Bing IIRC.
I have been intrigued by Kagi, but Im not really ready to pay a sub for a search engine.
Honestly? Bing chat has been quite good to me if I have specific questions. It searches the web and gives me a summary.
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).
Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called “Lens”, which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I’ve defined - see image.Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
(copied from another thread I replied to)
Also, TIL about URL rewrites! Now all of my search results use private frontends. Thanks for the tip!
Interesting. I just searched some topics related to a paper I’m working on and found some good resources which I haven’t seen on Google yet. Really interesting.
Unfortunately, still Google, with Bing a distant second. I’ve realised at least half of my searches are locale-specific, and engines like DDG are so American-centric. This is even with letting DDG use accurate location data. Reading the options here and hoping to find something I’ve not heard before that’ll work and hopefully replace Google as my main search engine.
I personally use You.com, Mojeek and Startpage. All of them are great 👍…
In between Brave Search and DDG.
Brave Search for the majority of things. Ecosia and sometimes Searx.
My top ones:
DuckDuckGo - may not be as private as they claim, but has been my go-to for years. Simple, but feature-full and still mostly decent for search.
Marginalia - a search engine that favors text heavy websites, perfect for research
Searx instance - not my main due to how spotty the instances can be and lazy to set up mine. But can basically grab stuff from all the “big” search engines, which saves a lot of time. I don’t consider it a godsend like most people do, though. As since big engines can give poor results.
frogfind - a duckduckgo interface meant for older computers that converts webpages to basic html. Perfect for news articles and tutorials where you want to skip the “fluff”.
I’m sort of between search engines. I currently use SearXNG on my laptops and LibreX on my phone. These are metasearch engines, so they usually pull in more and better results than, say, Google alone. SearXNG is good because it’s very private (depending of course on who hosts it); while LibreX is nice because it’s simple, allows custom redirects for popular services (e.g. YouTube -> CloudTube), and it doesn’t use JavaScript.
I think my crappy Android tablet uses Mojeek, but it’s been a while since I last used it. I’ve also recently tried out MetaGer (rejected because some features required payment), Qwant (rejected because Privacy Badger saw a fair number of trackers) and SwissCows (rejected because of constant internal server errors).
The only thing missing from my current engines is filters for image search. Qwant and SwissCows let me specify the aspect ratio, vague size, colour, and license of the results. Mojeek, SearXNG and LibreX unfortunately do not offer this; which is why I’m between search engines at the minute.
Brave search works well, but I have the feeling they are playing with user’s data otherwise I can’t explain their business model