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
    744·
    9 months ago

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

  • jcrabapple@infosec.pubEnglish
    465·
    9 months ago

    Half a dozen people in here already mentioned it, but Kagi has completely changed the search game and changed the way I use the Internet. It’s like an old school search engine with modern conveniences like a chat bot and summarizer, but without the ads and other shenanigans.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
        142·
        9 months ago

        It’s either your wallet or your personal information…

        A surprisingly and insanely expensive to run and manage a search engine that isn’t just a reskin on bing (DDG). Even more so when you can’t mine your users for data.

        Kagei is doing really good stuff and the quality of results I get are much higher. The $10/m is it easily paid off within even a day or two’s use in my normal job. Never mind all the personal research that I do.

        Is a different model that is a not providing you with the best results that you are looking for. As opposed to steering you towards ads or towards partnerships. I like it.

        • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
          9·
          9 months ago

          I totally get the sentiment of saying when you pay you are not the product, however… what does any company stop from still collecting data anyway? I know that the kagi people deny that but why should anyone trust that.

          Companies have fucked customers/consumers over so much, there is no trusting anyone when it comes to data collection. It is just so easy. Even if they don’t use it right now, why not just collect it anyway.

          So, while I’d love to pay a little bit to support a service like that, I am so jaded by how dishonest companies have been about stuff like that, that I am not really willing to also give them money in addition.

      • festus@lemmy.caEnglish
        92·
        9 months ago

        I know, that was my reaction at first too. But I tried it for a month and honestly it’s an amazing search engine. If it helps you to know, when you search they also use the (paid) search APIs of other search engines and aggregate the results in a way to get something better than any individual engine - so your searches actually have a decent marginal cost for them.

      • StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months 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.

        • crimroy@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          9 months ago

          Which is great, privacy-wise, but results-wise it is just Bing. DDG is what I use, but that’s all it is

  • deadcatbounce@reddthat.com
    301·
    9 months ago

    Firefox allowed you to define the default search and have many many engines listed. That’s been a standard feature for many years.

    • quirzle@kbin.social
      91·
      9 months ago

      I’m pretty sure most browsers can. Pretty sure OP’s complaint’s a big misplaced on that one.

      • HRDS_654@lemmy.world
        5·
        9 months ago

        All of them do allow it, but not all of them make it simple. There are times it will change the search in the address bar but not everywhere else in the browser as well. Of the web browsers I use, Firefox is the most friendly to change.

      • vermyndax@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        The complaint here is the “address bar” search. I’ve found that most browsers will allow you to use other search engines, but you have to prefix the search with a letter or abbreviation. I’m finding that a lot of browsers will restrict your raw address bar search to their chosen search engines.

        • quirzle@kbin.social
          1·
          9 months ago

          I’m aware of the complaint, and stand by my comment.

          Which browsers don’t let you change the default search? Firefox does. Chromium-based browsers do. I believe that alone covers “most browsers,” though I’m curious if any actually don’t allow that to be changed.

  • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
    282·
    9 months 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
        8·
        9 months 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.

      • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
        97·
        9 months 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?

        • blurg@lemmy.world
          3·
          9 months ago

          If you’re not spending some money then you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

          • BSD (e.g. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, …)
          • GNU/Linux (e.g. kernel, Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, …)
          • GNU/FSF/FOSS software (e.g. LibreOffice, Vim, Emacs, , Compiler Collection, Gnome & KDE desktop, GIMP, VLC, Wine, Python, …)
          • Misc. (e.g. Wikipedia (& Kiwix), Gutenberg (& Calibre), Archive.org, CreativeCommons,org, OpenStreetMap, Lemmy, R, …)
          • Plenty of public schools, public library, charities, …

          Would like to argue with you. However, supporting these projects directly, if you can afford to, is something of a personal responsibility.

        • MadhuGururajan@programming.dev
          37·
          9 months ago

          People can do without search. Most will find better uses for 10$ an hour. Those who can’t probably won’t buy search. So, lose-lose for you who tries to convince people in every post.

  • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
    24·
    9 months 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
      8·
      9 months 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.

      • ____@infosec.pub
        5·
        9 months ago

        I was a bit wary when I first spun up an instance, but it’s very low maintenance and mostly just works.

        Does it choke in some edge cases? Yeah, but far less often than I had expected. For my own use case it’s low resource and does exactly what it says on the tin - nothing more, nothing less.

        It’s my default across a variety of devices, and is perfectly happy behind basic auth and a minimal nginx conf.

        Occasionally I’ve even surfaced some oddball results that give me unexpected perspective on a topic.

    • dumpsterlid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      9 months 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.

  • Badabinski@kbin.social
    264·
    9 months ago

    I’ve been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding “deep” results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don’t at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.

    Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I’ll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don’t want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.

    • sab@kbin.social
      31·
      9 months ago

      I’ve been paying for it for a couple of months now, am pretty happy with it. Feels weird to be paying for a search engine, and as it still only has a finite number of searches every month I still have to get used to not being reluctant to use it, but its results are indeed great. More focused than DuckDuckGo, less bullshit than Google.

      • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
        3·
        9 months ago

        Are you sure? I had been paying for a higher tier, but I remember they sent an email that they were changing or removing the search metering a while ago.

        In US it’s $5 for 300 searches or $10 for unlimited.

        • sab@kbin.social
          1·
          9 months ago

          Unless they changed something very subtly and very recently, there’s a cap on searches on the lower tier and unlimited search on the higher one.

          • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
            2·
            9 months ago

            You’re right. It’s $5 for 300 searches or $10 for unlimited. It used to cost more and still have a limit. I didn’t realize there was still a cheaper tier.

  • EmasXP@lemmy.world
    91·
    9 months 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

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      9 months ago

      if nothing else qwant has a good map, based on openstreetmap but with a vector renderer and with tripadvisor integration so it’s really easy to find restaurants

  • Dehydrated@lemmy.world
    7·
    9 months 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.

  • quirzle@kbin.social
    7·
    9 months ago

    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.

    Which browsers don’t? I think this one can likely be chalked up to user error.