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.
no mention of kagi yet? Son, I am disappoint.
I’m really happy with Kagi. The fact that I can blacklist certain domains from showing up in search results is chef’s kiss.
Back when I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, I found myself occasionally using the !g bang to fall back to Google results. So far I haven’t felt the need once in Kagi.
I’ve been using it for months and maybe popped back over to Google only a handful of times.
DDG is okay but it’s miserable in comparison. I haven’t tried Ecosia long enough to form a proper opinion but my first impressions weren’t great.
The only people who actively rail against it seem to be the standard group of Fediverse who are… a bit too online 😉
I’m also very happy with kagi. I get search results with no fluff to sort through or scroll past every time I search. It’s such a breath of fresh air.
Kagi is also doing some interesting things with search and many, many things that let you customize how the results are presented to you.
Also, intesrtingly, kagi is growing rapidly and as yet they have spent literally zero dollars on advertisements. Purely word of mouth.
They are high thinking people will pay $5/mo for search AND being limited to 300 searches/mo. I avoid subscriptions at all cost, so if I were ever to consider paying for search it would need to be a completely forgettable number like .99/mo.
It’s not lost on me, I get it, don’t pretend like you’re the only one who understands how advertising works on the Internet. That’s the agreement with anything you don’t directly pay for. The fee that Kago is asking for is unreasonable in my opinion.
I only heard of Kagi in lemmy, very intrigued, however as I lived in third-world country, the price plan is unfeasible for me to consider.
You get the first hundred a month for free.
Maybe you could ration it for when you need high-quality searches?
Due to how important search is, it is not a stable solution to place the trust of the technology, your data privacy, and fair pricing to a corporation. Kagi so far seems great don’t get me wrong! But enshitification from monetary incentives almost always occur. Open source search is the only stable long term solution.
Isn’t there that whole controversy with kagi going on about transphobia homophobia stuff?
Edit: apparently it was homophobia not transphobia.
ah, cancel culture at its best, I won’t be part of it. I took one look at these people, and when I see them cry racism over a completely benign website I know I should just ignore them.
The best search I found is by asking questions to real people in forums such as this one. It’s way slower than getting an immediate answer for a question, but the signal to noise ratio is higher.
This is the reason why I think Google is prioritizing reddit so much in recent years, because reddit became one of the only places where you can get real people (well, relatively speaking more than most other parts of the Internet) answering all kind of questions.
Generally, if I want an answer to something, I’ll search whatever I’m looking for followed by “Reddit”. I know a lot of people here hate the site owner, and with good reason, but it actually has made information gathering on the web sane again. Instead of my query coming up with a zillion AI generated webpages, I’ll end up with real people discussing a real issue, and giving their opinions and troubleshooting steps, etc.
I don’t know that it’s necessarily a search engine problem, but just an issue with the way the Internet has become.
Isn’t Yandex Russian?
I agree with the person who identified that ChatGPT is better than a search-engine, but you have to check it, because, unlike a normal search-engine, the ai-engine, itself sometimes produces disinformaiton, instead of only linking-to disinformation.
Checking is now required in both cases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Metasearch_engines
for some alternatives, btw.
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Thanks! Search results have recently been so bad that I found Yandex sometimes offers better results than Duckduckgo/Google/Bing etc. It’s quite sad actually
Stupid question: is this a recent development? I remember that seaeching for stuff was no problem just 2 yrs ago. Is it becauae I search more niche stuff or bexause I sont use commands like specific sites and others?
The enshitification has been a gradual process. Think of it as slowly boiling a frog. I’ve observed the quality of search slowly degrading over the past 2 decades. Just recently, it has gotten to such a severe point that searching has been useless.
I found that no general purpose search engine will ever serve my needs. Their goal is to index the entire internet (or a very large subset of it), and sadly, a very large part of the internet is garbage I have no desire to see. So I simply stopped using search engines. I have a carefully curated, topical list of links from where I can look up information from, RSS feeds, and those pretty much cover all what I used search for.
Lately, I have been experimenting with YaCy, and fed it my list of links to index. Effectively, I now have a personal search engine. If I come across anything interesting via my RSS feeds, or via the Fediverse, I plug it into YaCy, and now its part of my search library. There’s no junk, no ads, no AI, no spam, and the search result quality is stellar. The downside is, of course, that I have to self-host YaCy, and maintain a good quality index. It takes a lot of effort to start, but once there’s a good index, it works great. So far, I found the effort/benefit ratio to be very much worth it.
I still have a SearxNG instance (which also searches my YaCy instance too, with higher weight than other sources) to fall back to if I need to, but I didn’t need to do that in the past two months, and only two times in the past six.
And how would that improve anything? Like I said, any general purpose engine is a no-go for me, because they index things I have no desire to ever see in my search results. Kagi is no exception.
Been there, tried it, didn’t find it noticably better than the other general purpose search engines.
Well I’m not going to argue with you. I’m just saying that kagi has a lot of customizations of search that let you tailor it to your needs.
When you’re not ad-focused you don’t care if the client blocks instagram.com, facebook.com from results.
None: SEO is fucking everyone, and it’s not something that search engines can control. If a search engine gets popular, websites will optimize for it.
And its always the websites that optimize the most that you’re least likely to actually want
