Google’s results have been getting worse over time, but it seems like the last couple years, they’ve taken a steep nose-dive, completely overrun with crappy content farming.
I’ve mitigated a lot of that by doing searches for any kind of product comparison or technical question with “site:reddit.com”, but now with the possibility that that trick will become less useful over time as well…?
Yeah. What search engines are other tech folks using?
DuckDuckGo.
Bangs are awesome, I set it as my browser bar search, and I can search for cheese discounts in my local supermarket with one search string.
Try it, type !appie kaas into DDG.
Kaas voor iedereen inderdaad
I personally like duck duck go, the results are generally pretty good, and if they aren’t, it’s easy to search on other engines using DDG’s bangs. You just type “!g search term” and you can search on Google, and there’s a bunch more, like !w for Wikipedia, !aur for the arch user repo etc etc
+1 for DDG
And thank you for reminding about bangs
How did I not know about that already? I’ve been on DDG for a years.
There are a lot of bangs as well.
Try
!loblaws maple syrupas I see you’re from Canada.O damn! That’s bound to come in handy.
And to see if there is a bang already for a website you use often, use
!bang lemmyor whatever to see the list of !bangs for that site
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).
Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
This looks pretty good, and I wouldn’t mind paying for search, but it seems really pricy. I’ve never counted how many searches I do, but it’s definitely more than 10 a day. $10 a month seems like a lot for just search…
Made me feel a little unwell at the beginning as well, but considering that the search is one of the main, key features I use daily, multiple times, it is totally worth it.
I pay for a search engine, but:
- High quality search results
- No ads
- High customizability
- No weird SEO optimized Website results which help me not at all and I lose hours in a year clicking them by accident
- Did I mention no ads or sponsored content?
I’m happy to pay it myself, as I find that with other engines I pay in frustration and time because the results have to support those who do pay: the advertisers. Much higher value in my daily life than e.g. a Netflix sub.
SearXNG personally
Not enough people have said SearXNG yet, so hands down, SearXNG. You can change a lot of settings in the Docker code, so your settings are the default for anyone that uses it. If you prefer the actual default, you can save settings per browser with a local cookie.
I use DuckDuckgo through Firefox. It’s great and there are good extensions for extra safety. Also, Firefox deskopt is so customizable, i got a neon cityscape design for the bar!
I use startpage, that returns the same results as google but keeping you private and with no annoying ads
Startpage also appears to give me better results when I quote a search team than the other non-Google engines.
I really like SearXNG for searching. It combines results from multiple search engines (that you define) and strips out advertisements. You can host your own SearXNG instance if you are in to self hosting, or you can use one of the many available public instances.
