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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I use StartPage, but I keep an eye on Marginalia. It finds sites that other search engines miss.
Qwant on my computers and DDG on my mobile.
I use DDG as well. Have for years now, it’s actually gotten to the point where it gives similar if not better results than Google Search for me now.
Startpage
Kagi. I know it gets trash talked for several reasons, but I’ve used ecosia, duckduckgo, tried searxng, and now I’m back to Kagi. I just like it better all around.
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.
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.
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.
Hard to escape Google for its consistency. At work though I use bing(it’s trash) 😂
Edit: haters gonna hate, bing at work because I’m too lazy to switch defaults. Google for consistency, whether you like it or not 99% of the comments all says they use DDG and then admit they still use Google for consistency.
You’ll find yourself always back to Google.
DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes
Quite a lot of the time. It’s pretty damn awful, actually.
- Independent unlike DDG and other
- Parity with google for search results
- Actually good AI integration where it never hallucinates and only summarizes the sources it encounters
- Great integration of wikipedia, stackoverflow etc. into search results
- Great UI
Can you please expand on your arguments?
it’s just a search engine bro, i swear the puritans on lemmy omzzzz
Man, I’m just curious. I upvoted your post. Don’t know why you’re getting angry.
my bad didn’t mean to come off as angry
Yeah, shit happens, I get it.
Brave is decent! I struggles with looking g for smaller local results sometimes. Like you really have to specify the town/cities for small businesses and stuff. Which I suppose is good. That probably means it’s not creeping on your location constantly
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.
Kagi. Well worth the money.
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.
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.
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.
