Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn’t a clear solution to navigating the web because it’s either ai slop or the results are poor.
And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you’re looking for.
And so I told them I’d compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.
So far I have:
Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.
Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik
Ecosia: works great but relies on bing
I have tried things like qwant ect but haven’t really settled on those.
Any other suggestions?
I’d tell em to use udm14 but it’s still google so I’d rather keep that as a plan B.
Kagi. Once you try it you’ll never go back.
I never understood the hype about it. I tried it for a while then my trial expired. I cannot say I miss it. It was okay, nothing that blew my mind
same here, never found anything on kagi which I cannot using any other search engine.
If you only searched without exploring its various options and features, that makes sense. When you start blocking, boosting, and pinning domains; start exploring lenses and everything, it’s benefits become obvious.
That was exactly what I did, but I still found the quality of its searches ultimately no better than a standard Google search with a basic ad blocker purging the sponsors and AI summaries. Not worth half its price, especially when the guy getting the money is as nutty as he is.
Selfhosted SearXNG or ddg noai / startpage when i get rate limited
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ is a decent way of avoiding some ai generated junk.
They should have turn it into the default and remove AI or make it opt-in.
yea true, bet atleast you have the option to opt out…? 🥀
I use marginalia search and wiby to find “small web” content. Good for finding more human created resources deeply buried in most search indexes.
I use Qwant as my daily mostly because it’s European and I can turn of AI.
Kagi for regular searches, DDG for incognito mode because I don’t care to enable Kagi every time I use incognito windows.
DDG is my goto, I always have a SearXNG instance, but it’s relatively slow and runs into problems too frequently to be my goto
I have been using Brave Search for a couple of years and have been very satisfied with the results. It uses its own index instead of relying on Bing or Google like most search engines. The summaries are also one of the few cases that I have found AI to be useful for some more obscure questions.
The image results are very poor though, so I still use DuckDuckGo for that.
I use Brave Search all the time and like it a lot.
Kagi.
I hate that it sounds the same as Italian “caghi” meaning “you shit”
I use Kagi for personal devices. I wish there was an open source alternative, but there’s not. So I’m stuck.
For work or other devices, I use Qwant.
qwant for basically everything, tineye for reverse image search and google for that 1 out of 100 searches that i cant get an adequate qwant search of
google for porn. brave-search for everything else
Well, at risk of downvotes…
I know what your asking but tbh I generally don’t search, at least not like we used to. It’s weird to say that, like I’m making some claim to heightened purity or some bullshit but it’s not that at all. Search is just … noisy AF these days.
I actually find myself using fewer sources, more directly and own my terms.
Eg: For something like PubMed, I go to pubmed (or define a proper boolean PICO search in an indexing tool or lit tool like Mendeley)
Or I can hit the wikipedia API (or even better, self hosted kiwix) and find what I need.
Or, for known, commonly visited sites (like fan wikis), I use self-written tools.
There are plenty of sites have public facing, nicely formatted, JSON friendly results. Others are just clean to scrape. A recent discovery was Muvitimes (for getting movie times listings).
These tools query my white listed sites to a particular depth, collect the results I need, and present them for review.
You can then cache the info locally to query against using something like Meilisearch.
https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch
There are other options too. Something like Scrapy can collect structured data and a Trafilatura-like extractor can remove menus, adverts, and repeated page content.
https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy
I’ll even use something like self hosted Perplexica. It can query SearXNG, Tavily, Exa or other sources.
https://github.com/kiranz/perplexica
Honestly, if it’s a quick throw away search, I’ll call my self hosted llm, get it to pull from Tavilly and give me the summary and citations. That’s been miles better than most other options for me but YMMV.
Finally, if you’re talking about random occasional searches on phone, when I can’t access my LAN, I don’t mind DDG-lite
Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.
