So, this is not a proper answer to your question. (The closest I’d give there, personally, is DDG, Qwant or Ecosia, all with their own caveats). But, I’ve been evangelizing a bit in favour of helping Mwmbl develop further.
Oh, and a matrix community, where the actual community work seems to be happening.
But even though it’s an infant with not that much more than a dream at this moment - I think their project shows promise, in audacity to challenge search engine giants alone, if nothing else. Currently, I am using it as my go to “first search” search engine, helping with curating results if possible (although, truth be told, in the past weeks most searches did not give anything useful at all). I also have the index building web crawling script running on the same server as my Fediverse instances - but there is also a firefox extension for more casual volunteer crawling without a cli script.
I can’t sell this as a “proper” search engine, but still, am happy in evangelising it to anyone interested in supporting what tries to become a proper, open search engine not just on FOSS software, but FOSS principles.
Not the response I wanted, but probably the one I need. DDG has been disappointing, even compared to Google, but you’ve given me a lot of great options. Thank you.
Update: We got the duo pack. You can set it as your default search engine in Firefox on desktop and mobile. The experience is fantastic and I’m never going back. Occasionally I find myself checking the search results on Google to compare and very frequently they are filled with ads, AI generated articles or down right censored. Regarding the last one, I looked up some VPN provider’s name I didn’t know that I found on Lemmy and the results were identical except for one result missing from Google but on the second place in Kagi results: An article about that VPN company’s private keys being compromised. That is something that I would like to know as a consumer about products I search for and it looks like Google is downright being paid to remove negative press.
Is Kagi still good? If not, what engine should I use?
So, this is not a proper answer to your question. (The closest I’d give there, personally, is DDG, Qwant or Ecosia, all with their own caveats). But, I’ve been evangelizing a bit in favour of helping Mwmbl develop further.
Basically, it is an attempt to do for search engines what Wikipedia did for encyclopedic knowledge. It’s still basically just a dream with an interface that’s experimental and a search index still being built, currently seemingly bottlenecked by available (monetary) resources.
Oh, and a matrix community, where the actual community work seems to be happening.
But even though it’s an infant with not that much more than a dream at this moment - I think their project shows promise, in audacity to challenge search engine giants alone, if nothing else. Currently, I am using it as my go to “first search” search engine, helping with curating results if possible (although, truth be told, in the past weeks most searches did not give anything useful at all). I also have the index building web crawling script running on the same server as my Fediverse instances - but there is also a firefox extension for more casual volunteer crawling without a cli script.
I can’t sell this as a “proper” search engine, but still, am happy in evangelising it to anyone interested in supporting what tries to become a proper, open search engine not just on FOSS software, but FOSS principles.
DDG is just Bing under the hood.
Indeed, which is why I couldn’t recommend it without caveats and I at least don’t know of a search engine I could recommend without caveats at all.
Not the response I wanted, but probably the one I need. DDG has been disappointing, even compared to Google, but you’ve given me a lot of great options. Thank you.
I’ve had really good success with https://www.qwant.com/ and with https://www.startpage.com/
Isn’t StartPage just Google’s results, but less personalized?
I believe it uses a combo of bing and google with anonymizers, yes. I’ve just started poking around there due to waterfox mobile using it by default.
Thanks! I’ll give it a try.
Yeah kagi is still good. I’ve been using it for a while and am very happy.
Thanks for the feedback!
Kagi is great if you have the change to spare.
Probably off topic, but now I’m imagining myself shaking a cup of change at passers by.
“Spare some change to help an old man get ad-free search results?”
How much does it cost?
10 per month, 14 in a duo deal
Thanks! A bit steep but probably worth it in the end. Do you know if you can set it as the default search in Firefox?
Update: We got the duo pack. You can set it as your default search engine in Firefox on desktop and mobile. The experience is fantastic and I’m never going back. Occasionally I find myself checking the search results on Google to compare and very frequently they are filled with ads, AI generated articles or down right censored. Regarding the last one, I looked up some VPN provider’s name I didn’t know that I found on Lemmy and the results were identical except for one result missing from Google but on the second place in Kagi results: An article about that VPN company’s private keys being compromised. That is something that I would like to know as a consumer about products I search for and it looks like Google is downright being paid to remove negative press.
Thank you so much for responding and I think you just sold me on it!
Not sure, I’m still trying to convince SO to get a duo.