Since Internet search has and will change, which search engines do you use successfully, and what are their advantages?

8 points

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)

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2 points

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.

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1 point

Also, TIL about URL rewrites! Now all of my search results use private frontends. Thanks for the tip!

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4 points

I use DuckDuckGo, I forgot how to live without the search tags such as !yt, !fb, !w to search specific sites.

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4 points

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”.

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3 points

In between Brave Search and DDG.

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3 points
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2 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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