Since Internet search has and will change, which search engines do you use successfully, and what are their advantages?
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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)
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.
Also, TIL about URL rewrites! Now all of my search results use private frontends. Thanks for the tip!
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”.
Startpage, google search results without ads, trackers but much slower, the slowness can get annoying sometimes when my internet speed is bad
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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.
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.
I have switched to Ecosia few days ago. No conplains so far. Its free, and builds off Bing IIRC.
I have been intrigued by Kagi, but Im not really ready to pay a sub for a search engine.
I use DuckDuckGo, I forgot how to live without the search tags such as !yt, !fb, !w to search specific sites.
Kagi.com no ads, private, you pay a subscription so they look for your interest instead of you being the product, has many customizations, very responsive company, very good use of AI, super fast, doesn’t require javascript, and many other things, just give it a try
What paid plan do you use ? If it’s not the ultimate plan, do you often go over the “limit” ? I’m interested, but I have a hard time knowing what plan I will actually require.
I’m also on the early adopter unlimited plan. What I suggest is that you take a conservative plan and observe your behavior, you can always upgrade to a bigger plan later
I personally use You.com, Mojeek and Startpage. All of them are great 👍…
I have to shout out Wiby. It is focused on like weird personal websites from the early 2000s, that kind of thing. Absolutely not a general-purpose search engine, but mashing the “surprise me” button will take you to all sorts of fun places.
I’m just hitting ‘surprise me’ and having a blast.
- SearXNG
- When I need code snippets, I fire up Edge and ask ChatGPT.
