I’m trying to degoogle. I’ve heard good things about DuckDuckGo and I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and it’s pretty solid. But I’m just wondering what the Lemmy/Piefed community prefer for a search engine.
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No ai ddg has been a decent general search engine, but if I can’t find something I’ll us marginalia, mojeek, alltheinternet, and even yandex (if I’m desperate). For your research: InstallGentoo Wiki has a fairly comprehensive list of search engines albeit not the most up to date; Seirdy has a blog post reviewing many search engines including some more niche ones; and The Search Engine Map illustrates which engines use what index.
Mostly DuckDuckGo but I do want get kagi at some point. I’ve also been trying searxng self hosted but I want to use it more before I judge it since I probably still need to tweak some settings.
Hard to escape Google for its consistency. At work thought I use bing 😂
Kagi. I knowmit gets trash talked for several, reasons, but I’ve used ecosia, duckduckgo, and now I’m back to, Kagi. I just like it better all around.
It feels like spam to mention Kagi since it’s all over the place (even on Hacker News), but I’ve been a subscriber since the beginning and it made me a “2x programmer” due to their good results.
If I had no money left, I would try SearXNG.
For programming questions why not use an LLM? The days of searching a specific problem are long done. LLM+Documentation is all you really need now days.
I learn a lot while I search. LLMs may or may not hallucinate, and I’m not learning.
Been a Kagi user for about 6 months now. Not one negative thing to say. So refreshing to have good results again.
Kagi user since 2022, according to my account. I’ll admit that I rarely ever cross-check with other search engines. I like their assistants too (they are basically re-selling access to all big LLMs in their Ultimate tier). But you don’t really need those, what keeps me there are the good search results. (And the ability to easily block/raise whole domains on the results.)
I love being able to flip on the "forums"or “fediverse” scope when I’m looking for opinions or recommendations. It saves me having to scroll through a bunch of resellers, manual reporters, fake review sites, AI listicals, etc.
If I had the money, I would at the very least try Kagi, but for now I’m just surfing with DuckDuckGo using their “noai(dot)duckduckgo(dot)com” link. Auto turns off their dumb “duck ai” nonsense and using their filters to try and hide genAI images.
I also looked it up because I was curious and if the source is correct, I learned that the “noai” part of that link is a subdomain.
Startpage
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Can you describe why you think its better than Qwant or DDG? I tried it but didn’t felt that much difference to have an account for search engine.
I don’t know how those search engines evolved, but last time I checked (a few years ago), Qwant was the worst search engine ever, and DDG was pretty average. I don’t know how Kagi works, but it’s good for every query. I usually don’t recommend it because it’s expensive ($10 a month) but it really changed how I work, especially for programming topics.
As an example, Qwant still uses w3schools as the reference for C++, which is some “4chan trolling” level of stupidity.
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searxng (self hosted). But I understand not everyone can host something. There are public instances out there as well.
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Not necessarily.
You configure which engines you want it to use.
Although lately the list of engines which are working well seems to be quite small.
Yes, but my search data doesn’t leave my house. Also since my IP changed multiple times a week (not quite daily, but close), I prefer this to using someone else’s instance. There is some obfuscation to be gained by searching through a public insurance as well, but my insurance is still used by multiple people, not just me.
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DDG is good enough for me.
Qwant/Ecosia.
Used to use Kagi (paid search engine, if you don’t know it) which was truly remarkable and well worth its cost, at least in my eyes. But, as a EU citizen, last year US shit show, made me realize I’d better rely less on US-based tech. So…
Yeah I’m with Qwant for the moment.
I used to use Kagi.
I used to use DDG before that.
I don’t really have any complaints about any of these.
I’m trying to get better at using bangs to search on the sites I’m specifically looking for.
Just curious, what made you change from Kagi?
Agreed. If anyone knows about an EU (or allies) search engine with a business model that’s not strictly based on advertising (topped up by grants perhaps), let us know.
I use Ecosia/Qwant for now.
The only independent search engines that support my native Japanese are Google, Bing, Brave, and Yep.
Of these, I generally search using Brave, and if I’m not satisfied with the results, I search again using DuckDuckGo.
I don’t use Yep because of its strict bot restrictions.Also, on the rare occasions when I need to do an exact match or a search using
site:, for some reason, Brave and DuckDuckGo are useless, so I reluctantly use Google, which is a shame.
As someone living in Japan, I do not recommend QWant, which is recommended in this comment section.As I’ve commented before, this is because the service geoblocks countries that have non-Western languages as their official languages.
As someone studying Japanese, oooo that’s awesome I gotta check them out! :D
same for korea, qwant used to work but they seemed to have blocked access around 2023 or so
I’m brazilian, our official language is Portuguese, and Qwant is not available here either. It seems they don’t understand that people can speak two or more languages? They could just put an “English-only results” warning, but ok.
DuckDuckGo: good all-around search engine
Searx: when I’m feeling extra FOSS
Kagi: when I need Google from 10-15 years ago. Has a cool “lenses” feature that let’s you target the type of sites the results come from. (Kagi is one of those rare moments where I use something proprietary because the more open alternatives can’t meet my needs yet.
Kagi for well over a year now
I use Startpage, everything else kind of sucks imo.
I just started using this one. So far I’m looking it. The Shopping tab is useless, but the search and image results are refreshingly different from the garbage you get from Google or DuckDuckGo.
I forgot it had a shopping tab. I never used it in any other search engine that I can recall. Google has been ass for many years. I stopped using it years ago. I’ll take Yandex over Google at this point. Also, Yandex is good for sailing the seven seas.
Kagi. Well worth the money.
