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’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.
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 😉
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.
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.
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.
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?
Kagi
I use Firefox + Brave. Not for everyone, but I appreciate that it keeps the modern browser look without all the edge/chrome spam.
I switched to ChatGPT and find it superior to the mess Google and others have made of their search engines. I could never go back to a regular search after using AI.
I’ve found bing ai is quite good if you ask for the source after anything it spits out.
These models can invent a source. Their only incentive is to have a convincing conversation with you. They are unconcerned with the truth.
It’s okay for things that are pretty low-stakes. If you ask for cooking or cleaning advice and it hallucinates you’re still at square zero regardless.
I have not found that to be the case at all. While not perfect, it is miles above Google Search and has not more errors than the misinformation any search will yield. It is a significant business advantage as well and those who are not embracing are missing out.
I think businesses should be at a disadvantage of all things. Business caused millions of people to starve to death in Bengal.
I found the original GPT-4 to be great at technical search questions! Though unfortunately the quality has been getting worse ever since.
I use ChatGPT 4+ extensively for coding and it has only gotten better over the course of the pastyear for me. I am really surprised how smart it is actually, and of course how silly and delusional it can be at times too which is always so weird but even that has improved. Its intelligence has different quirks than a human for sure.
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.
