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?

  • ShadyGrove@beehaw.org
    31·
    2 years ago

    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

  • AtomHeartFather@ka.tet42.org
    17·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • jason@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      2 years ago

      SearXNG has come a long way. I self-host, and I consistently get more reliable results than when I use Google, and you can set it to replace something like twitter.com with nitter.net or reddit.com with teddit.net, so you can still visit those sites automatically on mobile (not sure, but that might be a self-host only thing).

      • Tandrios@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        Thank you for this! Never heard of SearXNG until this thread. Sounds promising if you can use these replacement sites.

    • dillydogg@lemmy.one
      0·
      2 years ago

      What are the privacy implications of you being the only person using an instance? I was under the impression that part of the privacy from SearXNG was by obfuscation because of many different people searching from the the same instance. I thought about self hosting it, but didn’t want to share with the vps I pay for now.

      • AtomHeartFather@ka.tet42.org
        0·
        2 years ago

        I guess at the end of the day that I don’t have many concerns for privacy. I am not searching for things that might get me on a watch list. Searching from my private instance is no more/less secure in terms of privacy than it would be if I did a Google search. The search endpoints (Google, Bing, DDG, etc) all know the IP that the search is coming from even if its passing through SearXNG first. So if I was doing something shady, I could easily be tracked down that way.

        The main reason I run my own SearXNG is so I can strip ads and search multiple search providers from a single search.

  • Roland@beehaw.org
    13·
    2 years ago

    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!

    • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      2 years ago

      Same here. I honestly didn’t notice a big difference between google and DDG when I switched. I generally found what I was looking for back then and I do now too.

  • Nankeru@feddit.de
    9·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • schnapsidee@feddit.de
      3·
      2 years ago

      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…

      • Nankeru@feddit.de
        5·
        2 years ago

        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?
    • sjolsen@beehaw.org
      1·
      2 years ago

      Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones”

      Does this actually yield useful results? I’ve seen this several times in reference to Kagi, even iirc in their own docs, and my gut reaction has always been “surely no one ever searches for ‘best X’, that’s a surefire way to get your time extremely wasted”

  • Maddi@pawb.social
    8·
    2 years ago

    I’ve honestly thought about trying bing search with the new bing chat. It’s just a large change from searching now. It might be a good option thought for helping to curate answers more directly.

    • Sev@pawb.socialOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      How do you mean, curate answers more directly? I haven’t really looked at bing recently.

  • tubbadu@lemmy.one
    7·
    2 years ago

    I use startpage, that returns the same results as google but keeping you private and with no annoying ads

  • agitated_judge@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    2 years ago

    Been using duckduckgo for years. At least for the type of content I’m usually searching for, mostly tech related stuff, it seems to me that it has always had great results.

  • maynarkh@feddit.nl
    6·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • ᴅᴜᴋᴇᴛʜᴏʀɪᴏɴ@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • pootriarch@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
      2·
      2 years ago

      thanks to this post, i’m trying out searxng and then kagi, neither of which i knew. hopefully there’s a searx instance configured roughly to how i’d want. i’m not philosophically opposed to paying, but search is a delicate thing to be personally identifiable - and i don’t care what your privacy policy is, if you’re taking my money, you can connect me with my clicks

  • girlfreddy@lemmy.ca
    3·
    2 years ago

    My go-to’s are duckduckgo, Brave and Ghostery for searches.

    I also have the Samsung internet app and Chrome, but only use them for gov’t websites that block my go-to’s.

    • Sev@pawb.socialOP
      2·
      2 years ago

      What do you think of Kagi? What sorts of scenarios / search types do you find yourself needing to fall back to a different search engine?

      • V ‎ ‎ @beehaw.org
        1·
        2 years ago

        I love it! Certain obscure stuff trips it up, which makes sense because it simply doesn’t have as large of an index as say Google or Duck. What makes it worth it is the ability to pin, blacklist, and rank sites, working search operators (Duck dropped them!), and actually useful knowledge cards.