It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.
Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.
- Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
- Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
- Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
- Yandex: https://yandex.com/
If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?
EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.
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I find all the kagi mentions to be very suspicious
If I had stock/investments in a search engine, you better fucking believe Id also have a bunch of bots crawling for the terms “What is the best search engine” and immediately hijack the convo with bots upvoting my search engine.
I cannot explain how easy it is to do this.
Your comment belongs higher. When given the opportunity to make money by social media advertising sometimes in the thousands or millions, companies, share holders, and conflict of interest groups take it. Cablemod’s burning adapters, cryptocurrency scams, payed positive youtube reviews are some great examples. In general there is no honor system and its best to assume anything that can be abused will.
Also manipulating votes is incredibly effective towards swaying public opinion due to the bandwagon effect. Spend a days worth of effort making fake accounts and downvoting any opinion you see as undesirable and most people will follow suit. This is especially bad in echo chambers like on twitter, reddit, etc.
I wish a broader audience could be aware of this. The best I can do is try to spread the word.
Sources:
- The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc
- Cablemod Recall: https://old.reddit.com/r/cablemod/comments/18o7bnv/planned_voluntary_safety_recall_of_cablemod/
- FTX Scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX
- Bandwagon Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
- Echo Chamber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
I always fear it comes across that way when I recommend it to people here. I’m just a very happy user and want to see them succeed.
I find it expensive for what it is (given that I still get a limited number of searches) and I’m not comfortable with some of their ways (I don’t want anything to do with AI, and I the idea they have of being nonpolitical seems dangerously naive to me). I also don’t like supporting non-FOSS projects all that much.
Still, it’s the best search I’ve found, and I’m paying every month until I find something better. It’s worth it.
I’m glad I’m finally not the only one feeling this way. I’ve been seeing them aggressively pushed seemingly out of the blue for months now. Especially for what is such an awful deal and zero evidence to their claims, just citing the marketing page at face value.
It’s not, really, I switched from Google some years ago and had accepted my faith with DuckDuckGo, but then tried out Kagi. I use search so much daily for work, the relief of getting quality results again is immense and probably saves me hours per week. I get much better results from Kagi than I got at the end from Google, and I can tune them to my liking:
- block Pinterest results when I search for images,
- downprioritize shopping results,
- rewrite all Reddit links to go to old.reddit.com,
- unamp google AMP links
- summarize long texts / documents
- quick answer from the top 5 results
…and so on and so on. It’s just so effective.
… suspicious
Why? It’s a great search engine that a lot of people find extremely useful.
Here are some options I use in my rotation.
Brave Search (skip the browser)
Mojeek
Qwant (French)
Yandex (Russian)
Mullvad Leta (Mullvad VPN subscription required)
MetaGer (German meta search)
Startpage (Private Google results)
DuckDuckGo (Private Bing results)
SearXNG and similar self hosted options are awesome, but I’ve found them unreliable.
Be skeptical of Kagi… It’s promoted pretty heavily around here for something that’s not FOSS.
I’m convinced at this point that Kagi is astroturfing on Lemmy, it’s unnatural. All they do is just cite the marketing page when questioned about the quality, or as to why they supposedly think it’s worth paying for compared to much more mature as-driven services that do respect your privacy.
I think you meant to write ass-driven
I’ve been using Kagi for 3 months now I think? And I’ve found it to be extremely useful for research…to a point, my only real issue is that after the first or so series of results it either doesn’t offer anything further or just no longer is showing relevant results to my search. Honestly though I’ve been very happy with Kagi and continue to pay the 10/month but if I do find something even better I’d happily switch. I’m not married to any particular search engine (well …least not to the extent of using Google services).
If you’re skeptical just give it a try I think they have a trial system in place.
THANK YOU for mentioning startpage! I have not heard of them but I haven’t liked using DDG very much so I’ve begrudgingly using google in private mode (and then I always forget to switch back and forth)
Took wayyy to long to find something not recommending Kagi.
Many people keep asserting that DuckDuckGo is as useless as Google, but I haven’t had a single issue with it. Could it be a regional thing?
I don’t live in the US and the regional results for my country are worse on DuckDuckGo than on Google.
But still, I noticed Google’s quality drastically falling down in recent years.
It’s not as bad as Google yet, but I find myself getting terrible or no results quite a few times.
Ex: if I’m looking for a niche blog post from example.com, just entering the keywords doesn’t return the right result, if anything at all. I have to add “site:example.com” and the right link shows up on top.
It’s kinda amusing when this happens, but I keep using ddg anyway because bing and Google had the same issue for the same keywords when I ran into the issue.
Ddg cannot filter out results. If you don’t want pages containing the term, term you add -term to your search and those results should not be included.
Ddg doesn’t do this. I did a brief test of many search engines, and only google and mojeek filtered results correctly.
Edit: yadex seems to have working filtering.
Yandex was way better for searches in russian sources, but it came to shit just like google and also excludes whatever russian government don’t like at that point. I searched for some software in it multiple timea and the first link was some noname, probably malware site. It also promotes it’s own malware like browser with questionable russian security sertificates and their own Alexa. I’d honestly not include it in any list.
I like DDG and don’t switch from it that much. I’ve also heard Kagi as paid search engine is good, but I’ve never tried it.
Is “super SEO sites” a catch all term for those 99% filler websites that have a tomato soup recipe (in theory) but actually start out with, “Historical evidence seems to suggest that the tomato was first cultivated in the territory that would eventually become Guam back in 1464…”
I’ve wondered if we had a common reference term for those? I wish it didn’t have a positive connotation though…
Those plus sites that are lists of buzz words that have nothing to do with the actual site.
I self host a searxng instance and I find the combination of bing, duckduckgo and qwant as the source engines to return decent results. You can use a public instance and choose those engines in settings.
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Why pay? I think the answer is pretty easy. If one doesn’t want to self host. Running any kind of web based service costs the person running it money. Google obviously makes money off of a user doing searches via adds and data collection. I would actually have no issue paying for certain Google services if it meant that as a paying customer they would not double dip and try and profit off the data they are collecting on me.
This is all coming from a person who has a server rack in my basement and multiple PCs scattered throughout my home, so I am no stranger to self hosting.
I would actually have no issue paying for certain Google services
Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior, Richard Stallman?
People have spare pc’s or laptops they can sacrifice as a SearxNG instance. I too have a homelab & i have not paid a single penny to have a hobby SearxNG instance on my old hackbook pro that I share with friends.
I feel like, the internet is more than just paying your way for services. It’s about creating and sharing services and decentralization. If Kagi takes off then we have another evil Google that wants to profit at the cost of users, but its name is Kagi. It might be an impractical answer, and it does take some work to create a better internet. End of philosophical rant about the true spirit of the internet
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Even though there’s a small monthly cost, the results have been consistent for Kagi. But consistency meets only half of my needs for search: I also want to make decisions quickly from what I find within the contents. If I were to to go to a link, wait for it to load, scroll the content, etc. – does that listed forum post have the answer I am looking for? Does this news article cover the nuances I have been tracking and would like to read more of? Kagi offers an AI-based summarize feature that helps. And that’s been meeting the other half of my needs, as well.
EDIT, an opinion: Search services may well be eventually replaced by small, niche LLMs trained to perform summerization tasks, such as Consensus, which I have used for work research, and Perplexity.ai. The AI summarize feature of Kagi is why I see the service as more useful than straight indexes, even when self-hosted. Kagi is a stepping stone toward this for me, and why I recommend it.
The ability to summarize pages directly on the search results page is a big win for me. I also use the kagi summarizer several times a day to summarize youtube videos that I’m interested in but don’t want to sit through the whole video.
Lol kagi bots spotted!
A 7 months old random fediverse account is a bot? You know that the entirety of the fediverse is like 0.001 percent of the user base of the social media giants?
That would be money really badly spent on astro-turfing bots.
This site collects quite a few web search engines: https://www.searchenginemap.com/
I mostly use bing now. I like that it can answer complex queries and provides sources.
Don’t have much trouble not finding things.
Its nice when you are deep in Microsoft already from your company and get BingChat Enterprise included anyways.
Its slower than OpenAI GPT4 at times and its alot more restricted, but it gets the job done mostly.
You need to hack the UI to make it nice, unlock longer inputs, disable search tool at-will, disable synthetic streaming responses (consistent token speed, but takes longer overall)Simple query via DDG, complex stuff and ChatBot stuff via BingChat Enterprise.
I thought the AI assistant was free? I just downloaded the bang app and I just use the AI assistant whenever I search for anything now.
I don’t use any sort of enterprise, or full disclosure know what any of the other things you said are, any of those options or parameters.
But bing’s really impressed me lately, haha, so I still use it.
Actually on my desktop, I just use the regular Bing search, which I do now find superior to Google for just finding quick accurate answers for basic stuff.
It’s still crazy to me a year later after switching all my default search engines to Bing after using Google for so long, but Google search is just such trash now, it’s insane.
It is free, but the Enterprise version doesnt store anything (not even usage statitistics) and runs on separate systems (allegedly) aswell as having no limits.
Oh, I see, yeah that does sound way better
Brave Search works really well for me, and they have AI responses at the top of the page now that are really good.
Not sure why you got downvoted like crazy, but Brave legitimately has a great search engine. It also uses its own crawlers unlike DDG, Startpage or Kagi who are really just meta search engines piggybacking off other companies’ results.
I like the french one “qwant”.
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I’ve found duckduckgo works fine for things that aren’t recent.
Controversially the bing gpt chat bot works alarming well.
The bing chat bot scares me a bit. I don’t want to use bing out of principle, but at this point they’re just flirting too damn hard.
Those AI ones like Perplexity.ai, Kagi FastGPT and even Copilot (Bing Chat) give good results not just in the responses, but also in the links they return.
I’ve been slowly pivoting toward Perplexity.AI as the search engine. It basically does what I do, search + find the resources and summarize it but it is automatic with Perplexity.AI.
I rather pay them 20$ because that is saving me time a lot (and time is money in my case). Kagi’s search is okay but I can get nearly the same by using ublocklist on Bing or DDG for my use case.
