I tend to use DuckDuckGo most of the time, but its quality has collapsed considerably. Google is terrible now and only worth it for reverse image search. I haven’t tried Brave much and SearX-NG was a pain to set up for being a de-facto Google and Bing wrapper. There’s Kagi but I don’t really have $120/yr for a search engine, nor do I want to deal with how they handle logins and session management.
I use DDG. It’s sufficient for me, and I never use
!ganymore because I quickly realised that doing!gfor poor DDG results got me even worse Google results. The DDG results are getting worse yeah, but it’s still usable for meLeta from Mullvad https://leta.mullvad.net/
They’re all pretty bad
Get uBlacklist and a user curated ai block list. Block any site that wastes your time and you will eventually have an OK experience.
4get, better searx ng imo
I self host my own instance but you can use other people’s instances. This is just one I found randomly. https://4get.ca/
Why not just use public SearXNG insrances? It’s what I do.
I’d like to set up my own instance at some point, but in the meantime, I get all (or most anyway) of the benefits of Searx without any setup or hassle. You can use just one public instance just fine, but what I like to do is use LibRedirect (that name, I know) to point to about 10 or 15 public instances and it randomly selects from those with each search. When I need it to be real specific, I have a couple public instances where I have saved settings.
If I want to use yandex or startpage, or just want to search say wikipedia, I’ll use bangs, which just means putting a couple exclamation marks before the engine name and my search, like “!!yandex <search string>” or “!!w <search string>” and it automatically searches there directly instead of going through the searxng instance.
By far the best way to search these days, imo. The only issue is that sometimes an instance will get rate limited or the server will go down, but then you just use a different public instance.
Yeah, my own searx-ng insurance with Yandex, DDG, Mojeek and Brave is probably the way to go. I doubt spinup is as hard as I remember.
SearXNG is the way
I’ve been using DDG since I heard about it. The quality of results has indeed dropped recently but I just assumed that was because the quality of all the other engines dropped too. I always thought they just pulled from Google & Bing and stripped out the crap, but maybe they don’t?
Anyway, I haven’t found a better engine that you don’t have to pay for. Kagi I hear is pretty good but you have to pay for x number of searches per month and I’m not about to worry about how many searches I’ve done per month.
Kagi is 5/mo for 300 searches (which is nothing for me, a compulsive searcher) and 10/mo for unlimited. I want to avoid spending 120/yr if I don’t need to.
Kagi has an unlimited plan for $10/mo. If search is important for you or if you need it for a job I haven’t seen anything that beats kagi so far.
I use DDG, it at least has the courtesy to ask me if I want AI slop so I can say “no”, and not have it forced on me.
I’m not worried about the AI overviews, it’s the indexing of AI content that annoys me
I use DDG. It’s getting worse, but it is still better than Google. At some point I might switch to Yandex.
Does China have any good search engines for English content? I’d consider Baidu but it is not practical to use if you don’t read Mandarin (though you can still query in English and get English results).
Also, for DDG heads looking to try something else, you might be interested in a browser plugin like this to keep DDG “bang” behavior with other search engines. I cannot vouch for this extension in particular though aside from pointing you to the same review page I just looked at.
I mean, given the internet situation in China, I doubt you’d be able to find anything that provides usable results if you live in the USA.
Depends on what you’re looking for. You won’t find western social media posts in the results the way you do on Google / DDG, but if you are trying to research technological / academic subjects you will probably do fine.
I don’t know. Yandex maybe? It does tend to prioritize Russian results a bit higher than any western search engine but so long as you’re using the English site it seems okay when I’ve tried using it. I think the whole web is poisoned with AI SEO slop and we’re not likely to ever go back. Going forward if you want info you’ll have to pay for premium search, for an AI assistant to search for you, etc. Knowledge is being gated behind a paywall of frustration and time-wasting.
Yandex is blocked at work :/
Mojeek and Startpage. Mojeek is independent of other search engines, but you can still directly use them via the buttons on the bottom if the results are not satisfying. Also, you can use it cookieless for directly searching.
I haven’t touched startpage since it was a Google wrapper, it looks better now.
I would only recommend kagi but you’ve already blacklisted it, amazing engine
Ecosia and Qwant have been okay for me. Might not be for everyone though.
Qwant and ddg are identical to me
There’s some little differences - for example, Qwant doesn’t spam you with irrelevant “Apple Maps” results on every search, as DDG has for a few years.
searx, mojeek(only for english results), swisscows, startpage(not the best but I like the anonymous view feature), yandex and sometimes ecosia, brave search through mullvad leta.
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