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Is there any good search engines? I mean I’ve tried searching recently for a solution I referenced 3 months ago and it’s disappeared from Google and Bing.
Shit, even looking up repair information for a household appliance if can’t find the model before the newest and it all points to a sale page for the newest version.
Maybe AkJeeves!?
Kagi is meant to be okay, but it’s paid.
There’s also SearX which you could self host.
I second Kagi with the additional mention of their “lens” feature that allows results to be restricted to scholarly sources which is very relevant to the meme’s search needs.
Plus forum search so you never have to add “reddit” or “lemmy” to your search phrase again.
& that pdf search after.
For a scholar lens, you can use Google scholar
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now, and I never went back to Google. Maybe give it a try !
My understanding is that duckduckgo is just Bing without tracking, I also have used it for a few years to decent success but figure it’s worth noting
Do you have history enabled on your browser?
Really curious what your last say 10 non-private searches were.
Asking as I’m constantly going back to Alphabet Adware Search (!g). If I just wanted the homepages of Fortune 500 companies I could use DDG exclusively, but I look for:
- forum posts
- image & gif results
- Lemmy results
And much more I can’t think of right now. For all of the above, I end up banging out of DDG (by adding !g) for Google. At least until I get in the habit of using SearXNG.
The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it’s written by a human (LLMs).
I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.
If they’d present you with all that spam content, you wouldn’t find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it’s written by a human, they’re going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.There’s also at least some measurements, that search results are decidedly getting worse: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse…
Mozilla recently announced some kind of partnership with Qwant. Hadn’t heard of it before, and I was highly skeptical (I’m a very cynical person). I tried it out and honestly I think it gives me on-average better results than Google and Bing does. Since it doesn’t track you it doesn’t personalise the results at all, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t have any ads, though I do use an adblocker so don’t quote me on that. It’s also very snappy. Bing often has long loading times for me, which was incredibly frustrating.
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kagi
scholar.google.com is where you want to go.
Also, in my Google-fu experience technical terms work well for finding better scholarly results.
Same experience I have had. Swapping to scholar gets me relevant results that aren’t filled with ai gibberish and backwater Hokum. Still have to be careful about study sizes and sigma values and applicability, but miles ahead for at least getting to that being my issue.
Your scholarly ways are not safe from AI gibberish.
Yes this is absurd, but it’s a (serious) scientific community issue, not a search engine issue.
What’s the scientific term for rocks?
In fairness, I was thinking specifically of plants. I expect better results when looking up “S. lycopersicum” than “tomato”.
An example off the top of my head is saying pyrite instead of fool’s gold.
I’m not sure what exactly you’re typing into the search field, but I don’t anything like this. The top 3 sites I get for a search of “minerals” are wikipedia, australian museum, and britannica. Typing in “crystals” gets me a healthline article debunking crystal healing, but the following results are some woman’s personal store and amazon. Lastly, being direct about wanting scientific articles gets me said articles…
Side note: Why are there so many people pushing for kagi in this thread and skipping over the fact that duckduckgo exists? It’s kinda bizarre to see.
Hell, typing in “scientific data about minerals” gets me a bunch of university geology department websites.
Why are there so many people pushing for kagi in this thread and skipping over the fact that duckduckgo exists?
It’s a tide ad
I’ve commented about potential Kagi astroturfing here before.
Seems likely to me.
Their trial - too short for me - felt like a private Google w/improvements.
Now, as a filthy freeloader, my default is DuckDuckGo. I am dissatisfied with the results and !bang out to Google (!g) about half the time. I pray DDG makes use of this data to improve their engine.
tl;dr astroturfing vs. bad results vs. enabling the king of adware
Gosh I need to set up SearXNG! Also “private Google” vibes. Instances here
Half the time?
I switch to another search engine about 1 in 100
Google results are different for everyone by design. Results vary per person because of assumptions made about what you’d like to see. I believe the term is filter bubbles.
Idk if anything has changed since but a high school teacher showed us this in a computer lab. She gave us an exact phrase to type in and we all compared search results. They were similar enough to be useful but had significant differences in what the first page showed. And we weren’t even signed in to our school accounts, when we did it was even worse.
I pretty much dislike that DDG is not opensource while preaching about privacy and stuff. But tbh no idea what Kagi is.
Kagi is a paid
open sourceand private search engine. Folks seem to really like the results they get from it 🤷🏻Edit: not open source
Kagi is not open source as far as I can tell. They have a few open source small projects but the bulk of it is closed source.
Oh, thanks for the correction! I think I confused it with another search engine and mixed the two together in my head
Maybe searxng?
Nah, it was stract, which if I understand correctly is open source and has it’s own index. Though the results haven’t been amazing in my experience. Still, it’s exciting it exists though :)
I don’t even get “did you mean” anymore. Just, we found more examples of this, so this must be what you meant.
Even DuckDuckGo straight-up tells you “we didn’t find many results containing [blank].” Yeah. That’s why I wrote [blank.]
Ever died from smallpox while holding a healing crystal?
Didn’t fucking think so 😎
For those looking for some Google alternatives:
- Qwant has a custom indexing strategy and is okay
- Brave Search ~uses Google and Bing~ EDIT: they use a custom index too
- Startpage uses Google and Bing and it’s prettier than Brave IMO
- SearX is ugly but has a lot of sources
- Perplexity AI tracks the shit out of you but it’s decent
- Kagi is customizable but it costs you
Feel free to add on any I missed or opinions on these; I haven’t used any extensively
EDIT: Ecosia for trees and DDG for Bing without ads
Brave Search does not use Google and Bing. And why did you skip over DDG?
I’ve updated the post to say that in Brave uses a custom index. I skipped DuckDuckGo because it only uses Bing :(
Brave uses its own index. It used to be supplemented with results from other engines but I believe they have now phased that out.
Brave is the best of the free options in my experience, and it supports “bangs” which let’s you send your querry to a different engine (typing “how far is it to the sun !g” will pass the search to google. Duckduckgo also supports bangs), this is especially helpful for image searches (!gi for google images) since braves image search sucks dogshit 😅
Quant seemed like the second best free option in my experience. Some people don’t like brave as a company for various reasons, so quant may be a good option for those folks. Its my understanding that Mozilla has worked with quant in some way, which is kinda neat.
Both have their own index making them a sustainable/viable option going forward, where meta search engines that use other engine’s results are at the whim of those they fetch the results from (but may provide better results by piggybacking off a larger successful engine)
Thank you for the corrections! I’ve updated the post. I agree that Brave search had the best results/UX. As you mentioned, I have my own moral qualms with brave as a company.
You’re very welcome, thanks for your initial post laying out a bunch of the options for folks to think about ☺️
Hope you have a good one!
Qwant was good until they georestricted it for no reason
Try Andisearch, it was the first AI search ever and apart is one of the most private search engine which even actively protect your ID, no ads, no tracking, no logs, anonymous.
Adding as search engine in your browser
https://andisearch.com/?query=%sPerplexity, well, is still one of the more private AI, but best to use the extension which works well and anonymous (logs only tech data), Chromium only. In Firefox you can use perplexity only as search engine from the website itself.
Don’t forget DuckDuckGo.
Added!
Aaaaannd this is why I use Kagi. The site ranking feature let’s me block or down rank sketchy sites. (And lets you boost credible sites.)
let’s
HERE COMES THE S!
As a gem and mineral collecting hobbyist I feel this pain so, so much.
This scene live rent free in my head. Also fuckin Crystal Healing types make me look bad when I just think pretty rocks look nice
I know right? Completely ruin geology.
God I had this issue looking for used wheels for my car. Like, actual wheels to use for a track day, but results showed nothing but simracing threads for used STEERING wheels.
It looks like OP tried to write $99.99 but got drunk and wrote it backwards
Could be Québécois . They put the dollar sign after the number, rather than before if I recall.
Their own national standards documents prescribe putting it in front when using English
Google decides what you want to see and what you want to see is right wing garbage.
“scientific data about minerals -crystal -healing” should do it
I’ve tried the exclusion Boolean term with Google before, and it really didn’t work :(
maybe try -“thing”?
Excluding crystal from a search about minerals may eliminate more than you want.
true, that was my first idea, it needs some workshopping
Good job little buddy!
Psyhub is pretty useful for most articles behind a paywall.
