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?

  • 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”