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.
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I’ve been using degoog.org for a few months and frankly the experience has been flawless. I’m thinking of self-hosting it.
Yandex for reverse image search or piracy content
The noai DDG for everything else.
Unfortunately I have notice for the last couple of months that some simple things I can’t just not find the answer and the shit AI suggestion baked in the google search is giving me better results and I don’t think that is the AI that got better.
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.
google for porn. brave-search for everything else
Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.
