I’m still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don’t trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What’s the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?

Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a “default search engine” that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.

Edit 2: Thanks for the recommendation of Kagi. I’m going to roll with it for a while. I see they have an extension for Safari that allows them to hijack the address bar, which is just what I needed.

  • jflorez@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    82·
    9 months ago

    DuckDuckGo on Firefox. If you truly want to de-google your life avoid Chrome and Chromium based browsers like Edge and Brave

    • b000rg@midwest.socialEnglish
      19·
      9 months ago

      [Edited by the commenter to remove incorrect information, see below.] I’m not sure if anything else has come up since then though, and I’ve continued using DDG, just not for any sort of news or information on current events. I mainly use a search engine for dev stuff anyways.

        • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          I think rather than either or, it just ranks things differently and doesn’t give the best results.

          I also remember during the height of COVID, antivax people were saying to use DDG because their random blogs and conspiracy YouTube videos were closer to the top compared to google.

      • CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee
        3·
        9 months ago

        Apart from that, the results are often pretty terrible unless you use the exact terms from whatever page you’re trying to find. I’ve also seen a lot of people stating that search results keep changing every time they refresh the page as well.

    • lad@programming.dev
      5·
      9 months ago

      I’m still using it but it was fun when they had something along the lines of “your privacy is safe with us. Also, wanna leave your email?” 😅

      I am thinking of migrating to Kagi now, because search in DDG is often meh

    • Keith@lemm.ee
      1·
      9 months ago

      A long ago they had drama for apparently leaking user information to microsoft— but that was a while ago. Really they were accused of having biased results.

    • graymess@lemmy.world
      6·
      9 months ago

      I need to try it out. If it’s as good as its reputation implies and stays that way, I’d be $5/mo amount of interested. But I have no idea how many times I’m going to need to search for something per month. Not a fan of that limitation.

    • drfuzzyness@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      It’s really good. The price tag is worth it imo as they buy results from a host of other search engines including Google, but the results are actually better.

    • supercriticalcheese@lemmy.world
      2·
      9 months ago

      For the web search I need to do it’s really not worth it. if my job required good web search results to be effective then it would be a different matter but alas I am not a software developer or an analyst…

  • jcrabapple@infosec.pubEnglish
    49·
    9 months ago

    Half a dozen people in here already mentioned it, but Kagi has completely changed the search game and changed the way I use the Internet. It’s like an old school search engine with modern conveniences like a chat bot and summarizer, but without the ads and other shenanigans.

  • TiffyBelle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    44·
    9 months ago

    I personally enjoy DDG. Their privacy policy for their search is straightforward and there’s no evidence that they’re not abiding by it. I find it tends to prioritize higher quality blogs and articles ahead of social media results.

    I sometime use Brave Search as it seems to do better at giving social media/forum results as they seem to be prioritized higher by it, when I’m looking for more discussion-based content.

      • StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        Because DDG uses Bing’s API. Basically, you submit a search to DDG, DDG submits that search to Bing, Bing provides results to DDG who repackages them as DDG, then provides that to you.

        • crimroy@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          9 months ago

          Which is great, privacy-wise, but results-wise it is just Bing. DDG is what I use, but that’s all it is

  • deadcatbounce@reddthat.com
    38·
    9 months ago

    Firefox allowed you to define the default search and have many many engines listed. That’s been a standard feature for many years.

    • cerement@slrpnk.net
      22·
      9 months ago

      even simpler – Firefox will auto-detect a lot of search engines – right-click in the search/address bar and if Firefox can detect it, bottom option will be to add that engine to your list

    • quirzle@kbin.social
      12·
      9 months ago

      I’m pretty sure most browsers can. Pretty sure OP’s complaint’s a big misplaced on that one.

      • HRDS_654@lemmy.world
        6·
        9 months ago

        All of them do allow it, but not all of them make it simple. There are times it will change the search in the address bar but not everywhere else in the browser as well. Of the web browsers I use, Firefox is the most friendly to change.

      • vermyndax@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        The complaint here is the “address bar” search. I’ve found that most browsers will allow you to use other search engines, but you have to prefix the search with a letter or abbreviation. I’m finding that a lot of browsers will restrict your raw address bar search to their chosen search engines.

        • quirzle@kbin.social
          2·
          9 months ago

          I’m aware of the complaint, and stand by my comment.

          Which browsers don’t let you change the default search? Firefox does. Chromium-based browsers do. I believe that alone covers “most browsers,” though I’m curious if any actually don’t allow that to be changed.

  • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
    31·
    9 months ago

    Kagi. Nothing else even comes close. Kagi is what Google used to be, before they decided they’ll show you whatever is profitable, rather than what they know you’re looking for.

      • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
        11·
        9 months ago

        If you’re not spending some money then you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Would you really prefer the web continue to be supported by ads and people who sell data about you?

        • blurg@lemmy.world
          3·
          9 months ago

          If you’re not spending some money then you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

          • BSD (e.g. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, …)
          • GNU/Linux (e.g. kernel, Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, …)
          • GNU/FSF/FOSS software (e.g. LibreOffice, Vim, Emacs, , Compiler Collection, Gnome & KDE desktop, GIMP, VLC, Wine, Python, …)
          • Misc. (e.g. Wikipedia (& Kiwix), Gutenberg (& Calibre), Archive.org, CreativeCommons,org, OpenStreetMap, Lemmy, R, …)
          • Plenty of public schools, public library, charities, …

          Would like to argue with you. However, supporting these projects directly, if you can afford to, is something of a personal responsibility.

        • MadhuGururajan@programming.dev
          2·
          9 months ago

          People can do without search. Most will find better uses for 10$ an hour. Those who can’t probably won’t buy search. So, lose-lose for you who tries to convince people in every post.

            • MadhuGururajan@programming.dev
              1·
              9 months ago

              Yeah but they aren’t coming in here for the lack of options. They wanted to hear what’s everybody else on. I suppose you can make the argument that demand is there for paid search… but that’s because people have trained helplessness. Apart from 1 paid company i am not sure if people will have appetite for more companies in this space… because enshittification will happen here too.

      • COASTER1921@lemmy.ml
        10·
        9 months ago

        Yep. Like $1.99 or $2.99 I can easily justify but $5/mo for only 300 searches feels too steep to me reguardless of result quality. I’ll just go through the other pages of results from any other search engine.

  • Badabinski@kbin.social
    28·
    9 months ago

    I’ve been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding “deep” results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don’t at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.

    Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I’ll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don’t want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.

    • sab@kbin.social
      3·
      9 months ago

      I’ve been paying for it for a couple of months now, am pretty happy with it. Feels weird to be paying for a search engine, and as it still only has a finite number of searches every month I still have to get used to not being reluctant to use it, but its results are indeed great. More focused than DuckDuckGo, less bullshit than Google.

      • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
        3·
        9 months ago

        Are you sure? I had been paying for a higher tier, but I remember they sent an email that they were changing or removing the search metering a while ago.

        In US it’s $5 for 300 searches or $10 for unlimited.

        • sab@kbin.social
          1·
          9 months ago

          Unless they changed something very subtly and very recently, there’s a cap on searches on the lower tier and unlimited search on the higher one.

          • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
            2·
            9 months ago

            You’re right. It’s $5 for 300 searches or $10 for unlimited. It used to cost more and still have a limit. I didn’t realize there was still a cheaper tier.

  • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
    26·
    9 months ago

    I use SearXNG. It is a meta search engine so it use results from various other search engines and you can specify which with !. It does the job for me.

    • dumpsterlid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      Honestly I feel like searxng is way better than it gets credit for. It clearly isn’t as powerful as google but it isn’t drowning in SEO crap so that difference is entirely negated and then some.

    • CetaceanNeeded@lemmy.world
      8·
      9 months ago

      My favourite feature is that you can host it yourself, you can even set it up to search over tor or VPN if you’re super privacy conscious.

      • ____@infosec.pub
        6·
        9 months ago

        I was a bit wary when I first spun up an instance, but it’s very low maintenance and mostly just works.

        Does it choke in some edge cases? Yeah, but far less often than I had expected. For my own use case it’s low resource and does exactly what it says on the tin - nothing more, nothing less.

        It’s my default across a variety of devices, and is perfectly happy behind basic auth and a minimal nginx conf.

        Occasionally I’ve even surfaced some oddball results that give me unexpected perspective on a topic.