I’ll go first. I’ve used a lot of search engines, I used duckduckgo for quite some time but found their search results kinda bad. I’m currently using ecosia the search results are similar to ddg’s but at least I’m planting trees, so there’s that.
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DuckDuckGo. I can’t live without !bangs.
Do you mean like !google or !amazon ? I use ddg. Just making sure I know what you mean
yup. or rather their short form, !g and !a in your example, because no one’s got time to type out the entire names (:
Kagi. Yes, it’s paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:
- Actual privacy
- No BS like with DDG
- AI features (like a “quick answer” feature that’s really useful)
- Has its own index along with others
- Search results are great, probably better than DDG’s
- “Lenses” (basically narrow results by a set of sites)
- Devs are pretty cool
For some reason the thought of a paid search engine has never even crossed by mind before. I’ve been using DDG but this has peaked my curiosity. Thank you.
Edit: The pricing is… very… meh.
To understand the pricing, you need to know how they source the results. While they use their own index, that’s very small. Every search is an API request to both Google and Bing. And they pay for those.
So you’re basically paying for a proxy for Google and Bing search?
No, it’s far more than that. They don’t just bought give you those results, they do their own ranking. The results are far better than either. They also honor stuff like phrase search properly.
There downranking for spammy sites and tracker heavy sites, you can personalize results (block boost or penalize domains) and filter better than other search engines.
It is very meh. But I think if you’re able to, it’s well worth the price. Just don’t get the standard plan. That one is god awful.
It’s so worth it.
I didn’t know it was privacy focused or that they were building their own index, that’s really cool. Do you think it’s worth the money?
It’s only a few bucks a month. I think so.
The only thing I don’t like is needing to be logged in to search. That always feels like a huge invasion of privacy. The at least claim that they don’t log search contents though
Bit biased cause I’ve had it for a while and have a ‘legacy plan’. But even without that, absolutely.
I want to give it a try but it’s hard to justify the cost with limited searches. I don’t want to have to keep track of how many times I’ve searched or second guess if I “really need to search for that”.
Love Kagi. I switched and never had any reason to use Google again. Its that good.
Kagi. Yes, it’s paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:
Huh. I hadn’t heard of this one before, but I think I’m going to have to try it out.
I was using DuckDuckGo and it was giving me pretty ‘eh’ results, only marginally better than google on the surface level, but both weren’t really usable for deep older searches. (and ddg starting to add sus ads/promoted) Brave is better, but Kagi has been fantastic when I’ve really needed to find something specific, technical, or very old. I think the best way to come about the pricing structure and limited search results is that I think it’s not supposed to be your only search engine from then on. There are times when you need what kagi gives in terms of producing quality and relevant results, and times you just wanna search “[company name] reviews/is a scam?” that using kagi wouldn’t serve you better than anything else, so it’s more of a tool that you bring out when you aren’t finding what you need with free search engines. On it’s own page it doesn’t try and oversell you on it, they admit that the majority of people don’t need paid search most of the time.
I haven’t approached if it’s an early netflix thing where you could split the bill with others for one login/family plan, that might make it more feasible.
Kagi is absolutely wonderful. Highly recommend giving it ago. Gives me better results than google while having a fair privacy policy
I’ve been using Kagi for a few months now and I love it. When I think about how much of my life revolves around accurate information, the price is negligible.
DuckDuckGo, but I’ve been testing Qwant (also privacy focused) lately as well.
SearX-ng
It’s not comparable in quality at all…
Isn’t that hard to determine without specifying which engines are used in your chosen instance? Searx/Searng has provided superior results for me using a combination of engines compared to anything provided by any of the alternatives by themselves.
It can literally use any search engine you think of as a backend, so its strictly higher quality? Unless thats what you meant
Duck duck go first, and if results are shit, I default back to google
Duckduckgo for the most part, especially if I already know where I want to get to. Google as a backup like others are saying.
I’ve been using SearXNG. It is a fork of SearX, a popular open source metasearch search engine. Basically SearX allows you to use multiple search engines for a search, and only the results are there, no ads. SearXNG changes the UI to be better, adds some other engines for a variety of things to search, like images. Currently I’m using ericafteric.top as my instance; it is the fastest US instance with search suggestions support since I can’t selfhost.
I run my own SearXNG instance too. I set it up to a Hetzner box, then blocked all ports from the firewall except on the Tailscale network. This means the machine which wants to use the search needs to be connected first to the same Tailscale network. It allows me to prevent being blocked by the search providers for too much traffic and is been working great. I just open http://SearXNG from my browser and start searching.
Startpage. It uses Googles results, but you will not get tracked that much
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SearX-NG, coming off DuckDuckGo it wasn’t a major change in the internal structure (the search gets relayed over to a larger search engine), but there’s no one company behind it like DDG. They’ve been working together with Microsoft on some rather sketchy things.
I would still love to self-host something decent (that doesn’t relay over to a company), but nothing like that exists as far as I know.
From what i know the exemption thing was only in the app and has been removed by now and so far the alternatives are… Not very Suitable for everyday use, at least for me.
I’ve heard similar things several times, so I’ve been staying away. I should move more of my daily tasks to different self-hosted or non-corporate services.
Most small search engines use bing results which are a hit or miss compared to Google.
Startpage is the only privacy focused one I found that uses Google search results. The UI is fine for the most part, except the image search maybe.
Edit: typo
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Duck Duck Go. It just works for me. I’ve never had a problem with it’s results.
I hate adds. I was using Neeva. Just switched to Kagi. After nearly 3 weeks, it looks like 300 searches/month will work for me. So $5 a month is fine.
Just Google, unless I’m looking to pirate something. Then I use Yandex.
DuckDuckGo
I also use Firefox search bookmarks for searching specific sites.
Search Bookmark: You prepare the URL with a
%splaceholder and give the bookmark a tag, and you can typetag searchtermand it’ll open it.I’m using it for opening word definitions, word translations, searching reference documentation, searching specific platforms/websites/media types, etc.
DuckDuckGo
