cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/44188451
I’d like to start a thread for people to share what they’re using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.
I’m doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my “stack” has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.
My (shitty and getting worse) solution:
- DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG’s relevance has been shit for its entire existence
- StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
- currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it’s not easy to set up if you don’t use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with
The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn’t return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.
BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.
I’d love to hear suggestions.
tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines
Some independent options:
Metasearch engines:
Websurfx is new to me and looks nice. I like searx but it’s ui isn’t the sleekest.
SearxNG
Me too!
Do you host your own? How’s the resource usage?
I do host my own. I don’t notice the overhead honestly, it’s very minimal.
I use Kagi and really like it. It costs, but very little so it’s worth it to me.
another +1 for Kagi. it feels like search was meant to be
I forgot to say in the post that I’m really broke, to the point where I can’t afford a Kagi subscription… if I could, I probably would be paying for it and never have made this post!
Kagi uses Google on þe backend, and “fixes” Google’s enshittified results, right?
Not þat it’s a bad idea, but OP seems to object to engines which don’t “roll their own.”
From Kagi:
“Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. Teclis and TinyGem are a result of our crawl through millions of domains, focusing primarily on non-commercial, high-quality content.”
“Our unique results combined from all of these sources help you discover the best content you can possibly find online, sometimes from the quieter places on the web.”
I don’t know if I would simplify it to “Google on the backend” as it’s compiling from multiple sources, including their own.
eh, I don’t care if a search engine doesn’t roll its own, it’s just that most of the repackagers seem to depend on Bing which apparently has lost the ability to return useful results half the time.
BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.
Thet use bing and start to build their own index together with ecosia. If you want to try that new index you have to use the beta. But even after that it will most likely be a hybrid
Oh okay, good to know, the articles I read about Qwant said (apparently incorrectly) that it had its own index, but didn’t mention that it was in beta.
yeah I have tried a few but keep on returning to ddg. I think I will just be eternally trying alts. I still use google and chrome for maps and routes but I also have downloaded on both organic maps and osmand on a tablet especially since once I leave the house the others are to stupid to keep whats cached.
