I’m still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don’t trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What’s the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?

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.

Edit 2: Thanks for the recommendation of Kagi. I’m going to roll with it for a while. I see they have an extension for Safari that allows them to hijack the address bar, which is just what I needed.

  • jflorez@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    633·
    1 year ago

    DuckDuckGo on Firefox. If you truly want to de-google your life avoid Chrome and Chromium based browsers like Edge and Brave

      • StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        Because DDG uses Bing’s API. Basically, you submit a search to DDG, DDG submits that search to Bing, Bing provides results to DDG who repackages them as DDG, then provides that to you.

  • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
    222·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • COASTER1921@lemmy.ml
        5·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          $10 gets you unlimited searches now. Idk about you, but I was continually frustrated with the results from all of the other search engines. I figured $10 is a small cost for my sanity, and privacy.

      • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
        83·
        1 year ago

        If you’re not spending some money then you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Would you really prefer the web continue to be supported by ads and people who sell data about you?

    • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I appreciate the non-ad-funded option, even if it is expensive, but I’m not sure it’s even better than Google, looking at their sample results.

      For example, Steve Jobs (again, to be clear, this is the result they specifically provide as an example of why you should pay) has two different links to the same Wikipedia article in the first five results. https://kagi.com/search?q=steve+jobs

      Not to put you on the spot, but I’m still open to be convinced - do you have any examples of when Kagi did a great job to compare?

  • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • CetaceanNeeded@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • dumpsterlid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • EmasXP@lemmy.world
    71·
    1 year ago

    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

  • Dehydrated@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    Meta search engines:

    • SearX

      Open source, self hostable meta search engine.

    • SearXNG

      Better version of SearX. A list of SearX and SearXNG instances is available at https://searx.space

    Also meta search engines, but different:

    • DuckDuckGo

      It’s very privacy friendly, but it gets all the search results from Microsoft’s Bing.

    • 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:

    • 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.

    • Mojeek

      A small privacy focused search engine, that uses its own index. They’re also on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@Mojeek

    • 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.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeMEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I used to be a part of the DuckDuckGo hype train until I found out they did actually track data (not an issue to me personally, but it betrayed their key marketing point), as used to be demonstrable if you had a slow internet and hovered your cursor over a link (it would show the tracking data loading). It was the one thing separating them from Ecosia, and I decided to join the Ecosia hype train, even if their own promises are themselves highly exaggerated. Every effort to do what Ecosia promises, even failed efforts, are appreciable.