It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.

Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.

If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?

EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.

  • kd45@lemm.ee
    45·
    10 months ago

    Many people keep asserting that DuckDuckGo is as useless as Google, but I haven’t had a single issue with it. Could it be a regional thing?

    • Dave@lemmy.world
      37·
      10 months ago

      DDG is ok for most searches, but they have definitely hit a plateau. Programming search results are quite poor, for instance.

      I’ve started paying for kagi. Their results are just way better at this point.

    • Scrollone@feddit.it
      10·
      10 months ago

      I don’t live in the US and the regional results for my country are worse on DuckDuckGo than on Google.

      But still, I noticed Google’s quality drastically falling down in recent years.

    • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
      10·
      10 months ago

      It is as useless. After all, it’s just Bing. But if the results are good enough for you, then why bother finding something else.

    • cll7793@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      Hmm, I did notice a sudden severe drop in quality recently. Perhaps they are A/B testing something.

      • ares35@kbin.social
        8·
        10 months ago

        ddg has been going downhill for awhile now. they changed something significant a couple years back that just made results, especially after the first half-page, absolute shit.

    • Hildegarde@lemmy.world
      4·
      10 months ago

      Ddg cannot filter out results. If you don’t want pages containing the term, term you add -term to your search and those results should not be included.

      Ddg doesn’t do this. I did a brief test of many search engines, and only google and mojeek filtered results correctly.

      Edit: yadex seems to have working filtering.

      • amio@kbin.social
        15·
        10 months ago

        Google doesn’t do that properly anymore, either, much like the “literal search” (quotes) - used to work, now it’s a crap shoot.

    • overcast5348@lemmy.world
      2·
      10 months ago

      It’s not as bad as Google yet, but I find myself getting terrible or no results quite a few times.

      Ex: if I’m looking for a niche blog post from example.com, just entering the keywords doesn’t return the right result, if anything at all. I have to add “site:example.com” and the right link shows up on top.

      It’s kinda amusing when this happens, but I keep using ddg anyway because bing and Google had the same issue for the same keywords when I ran into the issue.