RetroFedWhich search engine do you use for what?
Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn’t a clear solution to navigating the web because it’s either ai slop or the results are poor.
And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you’re looking for.
And so I told them I’d compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.
So far I have:
Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.
Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik
Ecosia: works great but relies on bing
I have tried things like qwant ect but haven’t really settled on those.
Any other suggestions?
I’d tell em to use udm14 but it’s still google so I’d rather keep that as a plan B.
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I have a lot of search shortcuts configured in Firefox, and find vertical search is a good way of avoiding google.
And then, for general searches, I normally start off with Marginalia, followed by SearXNG, followed by DuckDuckGo if desperate.
Duck duck go for personal, Bing and Google for work.
Duck duck go isn’t bad, I can usually find what I need from them.
Lots of AI platforms use Brave search and lots of people use AI instead of search engines now, if your looking for something else you can try that.
I’m waiting for a real European search engine that is also digitally sovereign i.e uses its own index. The EU funded one sub index but it was promptly ignored by every single european bing frontend (Ecosia, qwant, startpage, etc.). Why, I don’t know.
Until then, the only search engine that seems to be doing any good with ad money is Ecosia.
Check out Uruky Check my comment ^ for a writeup.
They provide no proof that they aren’t just a bing frontend. I too can make a pretty website with a Hetzner VPS that forwards traffic to bing.
How can I trust anything they say?
Because you can choose which index you want to use and then you can compare it against bing?
I assume I need to create an account for that and login? Why should I go through the hassle of creating an account to verify claims? These are things that should be verifiable externally without privileged access.
And reading further, they say that after 12 months you can get the code with a BSL and then AGPL. That’s great, but they say you can’t publish the archive once they give it to you? That’s not very AGPL. And it means that you first have to pay for a year before knowing whether their claims are valid. And that depends on you getting the code for the relevant parts of the search engine.
It’s possible they are doing what they say, but to start trusting, there has to be proof. Somehow.
They don’t do free trials and you can’t “test out” the search without paying. The dev said it’s because they’re really small and don’t want to collect more data than necessary to fight off abuse. So you do have to trust and pay that 5$ to try them out.
But once you do it’s a cakewalk to verify that theyre not just a bing frontend or whatever it is that you’re worried.
At the end of the day they’re a company and you can’t verify anything 100%. If you’re this paranoid then maybe it’s not for you.
Just because I’m not willing to accept “trust me bro” doesn’t make me “paranoid”, it makes me not gullible. If you’re willing to trust them without proof, why not believe Google’s marketing about being safe?
I always use DuckDuckGo. It’s usually adequate, and certainly “the best of a bad lot”, if you want to look at it that way. I sometimes use bangs if I want to search directly on a site. For example, sometimes I’ll search for something like a code tutorial video directly from DuckDuckGo, and if I have trouble finding it, I’ll update my search to go directly to YouTube, e.g., “modern perl features” first, then “modern perl features !yt”.
I used to jump over to Google when I couldn’t find something through DuckDuckGo, but it’s such garbage now, I don’t even try. I haven’t used Google for months.
I use various SearXing instances. Some are better than others though. I will probably end up hosting my own eventually
I use xPrivo, base in Luxembourgh.
It uses the EU made Index from Ecosia and Qwant and own.
Uruky I’ve been using them for a few months, this interview is what made me switch. It’s a small team of 2 people (a guy and his wife), they have a handful of search indexes (EUSP, Linkup, Serper, Marginalia, Mojeek, PriEco, Mwmbl), and you can customize which of them you want to use.
I use EUSP index and I have to say it’s pretty good, it finds MOST things i’m looking for and when it doesn’t, at the bottom of the page there’s “Try with Linkup / Serper / Mojeek / Marginalia” so you can click around and see if the other indexes match something that your main one missed. And at the top there’s “Try in Ecosia / Google / DuckduckGo” (I sometimes use DDG and Ecosia).
In the settings there’s lots of customization options for the UI.
They’ve been clear they won’t include AI at all in this search engine.
You can pay with crypto, cash or card.
They are EU-based (EU servers, EU storage, EU payment processing, EU search providers) (Mojeek is based in UK, but whatever).
They have bangs and you can enable DDG / Kagi bangs.
You can create your own web fallback engines (like they have ddg/ ecosia/ google) by default.
You’re not required to give out your personal details when registering, you literally only get an account number.
5 eur / month.
Yeah idk I just like it. It’s minimal and does what I need, they’ve been adding new features and it feels good supporting big tech independent search indexes, services.
A year or two back when I tried independent search indexes they were all pretty bad and I concluded you can’t really avoid using Bing / Google indexes. But now? EUSP is veeery decent and in combination with the other, smaller ones they cover a lot of ground. I would say it’s in the same tier as Bing, but slightly worse than Google. But for 90% of the searches ? It’s good enough and you can always just use Ecosia when you need Google or Serper index (directly in Uruky).
I see people mention Kagi.
I used Kagi for 3 months when they gave me a free trial maybe a year back. It’s a good product and probably the best search engine out there. However, it’s also more expensive than Uruky (10$/ month) and more importantly they use Yandex as one of their search indexes.. They’ve also removed all mentions of this fact from their help pages. They also use brave index. You can’t choose to not use them and in general they havent been very transparent about the whole thing (as to how much they use each index)
By the way Ecosia relies on Google, not bing. They’ve switched quite a long time ago.
Just get a Kagi subscription and be done with it. I don’t have time to deal with the bs of free services.
The only thing that sucks worse than paying for your search engine, is all the other search engines
Kagi for everything, Google for the rare case in trying to find a product to buy locally and can’t.
I use a selfhosted OmniSearch instance. It’s a metasearch provider, supplying links from ddg, mojeek, startpage and yahoo.
It’s fine. It’s mega private and has no built in AI tools, which is what I care most about.
The creator has requested that their code not be mirrored to any proprietary platforms. It is availible at https://git.bwaaa.monster/
Simple to configure and if you desire to rebrand or restyle it, it’s as simple as changing the HTML and CSS.
I like duckduckgo. I use a self hosted searxng mostly because I think it’s neat. I actually like ddg better, but I still use searxng cause I like selp hosting stuff.