What search engine do you use?
Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn't see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?
DuckDuckGo
I use DDG too. When I redirect to google using !g it's usually out of desperation and it gives me the same bad results in a slightly different order.
I use this on my phone. It's gotten pretty great!
Searxng
Searxng.
I'm just annoyed by the regions issues, you'll get pretty biased results depending in what region you select.
If you try to search for something specific to a region with other selected you'll find sometime empty results, which shows you won't get relevant results about a search if you don't properly select the region.
Probably this is more obvious with non technical searches, for example my default region is canada-en and if I try "instituto nacional electoral" I only get a wiki page, an international site and some other random sites with no news, only when I change the region I get the official page ine.mx and news. For me this means kagi hides results from other regions instead of just boosting the selected region's ones.
Yeah that drives me nuts too. Shopping results for fuckin Home Depot? I'm in Europe you stupid search engine
And searching for a german word always brings up dictionaries from german to english, instead of Wikipedia etc.
I'm using kagi as well and have been very pleased with it.
Kagi. I like it
I just started using this and am still in the trial period but I will definitely be paying for it when my 100 free searches are gone. So many top results are exactly what I'm looking for. I can't believe my expectations have been conditioned to the point where this surprises me...
Yea it hasn't disappointed me so far, I'm also still in the trial, been waiting for a search that turns crap results on G and DDG to try and put it through the paces. Though compared to G it is nice not having half the results be sponsored.
I use my own self hosted SearXNG.
Same, it's super simple with Docker and you don't even need to fiddle with ports or anything. I should probably try running it at my work PC now that I think of it.. Anyway, duckduckgo has been good to me for all these years.
I run a "public" instance with basic auth so I can use it from anywhere (phone, work). I've made my instance my default search engine everywhere. (I know basic auth is not the most secure but I wouldn't even really care it other people used my instance; I just don't want it hammered.)
I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.
Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.
Theoretical search: "slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie"
\
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
\
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever "celebrities" have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.
slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie
DDG results weren't too bad, although repetitious and focused on the history of the gag, and not particular examples.
The first result on Kagi search is this list which shows the movie years in parentheses so you can easily skip through just the ones from the 1980s. The other search results are more about the gag itself - first use of it by Charlie Chaplin, etc.
Per Brave:
slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie
The classic comedy gag of slipping on a banana peel has been a staple in entertainment for decades. In the 1980s, this gag was featured in several comedy movies. One notable example is the 1983 film “Trading Places” starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. In the movie, a character played by Jamie Lee Curtis slips on a banana peel, leading to a series of comedic events.
Another example is the 1985 film “The Sure Thing” starring John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga. In this movie, a character played by John Cusack slips on a banana peel while trying to impress a girl, leading to a series of awkward and humorous moments.
The banana peel gag has also been featured in several other 1980s comedy movies, including “The Blues Brothers” (1980) and “Caddyshack” (1980). These films showcase the enduring popularity of this comedic trope and its ability to bring laughter and entertainment to audiences.
AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts. Learn more
To add, second result in Brave:
https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=slipping-on-a-banana-peel
Kagi:
Quick Answer
Based on the available information, the "slipping on a banana peel" gag has been a staple of comedy films since the early 20th century. The first known appearance of this gag on the big screen was in the Charlie Chaplin movie "By the Sea", where Chaplin's character "The Tramp" tosses a banana peel on the ground and then slips on it later. [1][2]
The banana peel gag was soon adopted by other silent film stars like Buster Keaton, who featured it in his 1928 film "The Cameraman". [3] The gag continued to be used in comedy films throughout the 20th century, including in the 1926 Harold Lloyd film "For Heaven's Sake". [4]
However, the available information does not mention any specific 1980s comedy movies that featured the banana peel gag. The gag seems to have been more prevalent in the silent film era and earlier decades of the 20th century. [1][5]
DuckDuckGo as a default with Google as fallback depending on what I'm looking for. For lemmy the default search of my instance works well enough so haven't tried external engines.
Pro tip: if you add !g to your search results in DuckDuckGo, it returns Google results
Yeah that's what I usually do
Same. I have had particularly poor results on image searches from duckduckgo. It's on par or superior to Google for general web searches, but man, Google image search is still better
I'm mainly using duckduckgo for 7 years now. If I can't find something with it, I try startpage, which sometimes helps.
I run my own searxng instance. It's amazing.
I also spun up my own yacy instance. It was pretty terrible. It could be good, but you would need a pretty beefy machine with a lot of storage and a lot of time for it to index for it to be anything approaching good.
Somehow I've never heard of searxng before. Would you say it's better than DDG? Are the memory requirements not too high?
Searxng is a search engine aggregator. It sends your search out to all the engines and aggregates the results. No ads, no bullshit, endlessly customizable.
You can use one of the public instances. You don't have to run your own.
Ecosia. These days it's better than Google.
Which isn't better than Google these days? They dropped immensly in quality.
Kagi. I haven't had a failed search results in months, and when I do google can't find it either so I haven't lost anything.
Yesterdsy I stumbled over this: www.mojeek.com Apparently has its own index.
this is correct 😀
Mama, look at me. I'm talking to a .com-owner!!
You are awesome for providing an alternative. Would you mind letting me know what's the average monthly cost running your infrastructure and if you are paying it as individuals ?
Kagi
A combination of SearXNG and Stract, for the most part. They're definitely not perfect (yet), but they mostly get the job done! And I think they both have a lot of cool filters and refinement settings that I haven't even taking advantage of so far.
For niche stuff it seems like a lot of hyper targeted search engines are popping up, like Sepia Search for PeerTube.
Kagi.
I know, I know... I just really like it.
Really? I tried the trial and didn't find it that much better than DDG... Specially not $10 a month for life better
I found it slightly better. I also find the entire user experience appealing, so that adds some points. I use web search dozens of times a day for work, so it's worth it for me.
I probably would go back to 100% DDG if I stop working in tech.
Perplexity
I switch back and forth between DDG and Perplexity. When I quickly want to look something up I find Perplexity quite helpful, just get the answer without filtering through search results.
I'm using Kagi. I find that it does a better job at finding "legitimate" sites rather than blogspam and content marketing. However I'm not sure I will stick with it a long time. I seems like it has mostly stalled and the team is getting distracted by making a browser, non-relevant AI (I have no problem with the few AI experiments tied to searching) and other side projects. We'll see. I really hope that they pull themselves together and focus or it might not last. But for now they seem like one of the better options available.
Bing's new "Deep Search" where it has some sort of LLM refinement iteration process has also been helpful sometimes. Probably the best AI search product I have seen, but definitely doesn't replace most searches for me.
startpage.com or duckduckgo.
Recently started using startpage and it seems pretty decent.
Since you mentioned not knowing if this is the right community. For any question where you dont know where it goes !no_stupid_questions@programming.dev usually catches everything. Theres also some other question coms at !cs_career_questions@programming.dev and !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev but theyre more specific. I can leave this one here though, its fine (especially since theres a bunch of info here now)
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
Source: https://metager.org/lang
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And has other useful features, for example:
That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.
Source: https://metager.org/tips
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
I'm avoiding the major search engines. If I really need a search engine, I use DuckDuckGo. Most of the time, search forms of a few websites provide better results. I've bookmarked search forms of e.g. wikipedia, Wiktionary, the python docs, Arch Linux wiki, github, dict.leo.org, bug trackers of software I commonly use (such as Mozilla's bug tracker) and so on. I'm basically using Firefox's "keyword" search feature in the way DuckDuckGo's !bang syntax works.
Qwant
I've been using Qwant as well and it's actually really refreshing. No nonsense and I feel like I get better results than Kagi and Google and Bing.
I love it so far.
There are some times when Qwant returns bad results where I'll revert to Google. Just to find worse results...
Jokes aside, Qeant handles most queries well, even local stuff in my native language.
I used DuckDuckGo a couple of years ago, but they added their own blacklist of sites (pretty stupid), and for my language it started returning crappy generated spam sites instead of relevant results. They shouted at the top of their lungs that for my language they simply index the results from Yandex, but this is a lie, they are different.
StartPage gave the best results, but they introduced a captcha that I got every damn request.
I'm currently using SearXNG, which collects results from Google. And these are damn normal results, unlike other search engines that consider themselves the smartest and edit the results.
Google. I usually find what I want with it, although it has gotten worse over time.
I tried DDG a few years ago and only found it worse. Like, there was a clear performance impact with me using DDG vs me using Google.
Same. Once every few months I give DDG another try for a week or two, but between their strictly inferior and more spam riddled results and the absolutely grotesquely bad Apple Maps they integrate, it's back to Google pretty quickly.
It's like that study found out: Yeah, Google results have objectively gotten worse. But so have Bing's and by extension DDG's, and more so than Google's.
absolutely grotesquely bad Apple Maps they integrate
You can use !maps query to workaround that. I typically end up using DDG as a frontend to other sites through its bangs syntax.
E.g.
!maps x location to y location
But yeah, if normal DDG results don't work for you it's probably not a huge gain.
Ddg. It's shit but it's okay for my purposes most of the time.
You.com was pretty good for highly technical topics, otherwise Google
Edit: use a VPN from the EU for Google, you'll get better search results
Shameless self promo: I was upset by this as well so I’m working now on a curated search engine just for anything related to webdev. It focuses on blogs and docs. No BS, just high quality sources.
Also it’s hosted on a PC in my living room ;)
Phind.com is pretty good for programming stuff, it's AI but it cites it's sources.
I feel like I see this question come up now and then across the communities I'm in, and there's always a debate over search engines lol. Anyway, to answer the question, I use Kagi for its custom rankings (and, more recently, Wolfram|Alpha integration, which I've found more useful than I expected it to be).
Because Google has gone to shit and everyone's desparate for a replacement.
Anyone have any experience with Swisscows?
If you mean for programming specifically, I... don't, really. At most it would be for a quick sanity check on syntax in a language I don't write often, for which Google is fine. But otherwise I rely on documentation and search features of the various language/tool-specific websites.
Presearch, Perplexity, and occasionally DDG.
Not perfect:
But here are some ideas.
More ideal ideas:
other stuff:
What am i actually using at this point? (Nothing is set up currently!).
*this isnt perfect! but i think overall i think i dont spend much time traveling to websites for info.
Historically:
Future:
There is certainly room for immediate improvement here.
Im just lazy.
I dont need the internet as much as the internet needs me.
Brave
I used to use Duck Duck Go, but it's supposedly not as private as it claims to be, and my understanding is Brave is a bit better there.
I don't use the Brave browser tho, just the search engine
