Here is an example for searching for “cats” with academic turned on. It’s not just .edus but it’s definitely part of the weighting. Nature is usually the first hit obviously.
You can also make custom searches with parameters and link easy access third party buttons. I did one for Google shopping for instance.
I hadn’t even seen other paid providers but I got real sick of Google about six months back, tried kagi on trial and paid for it before the trial was up, that’s how good it is.
I can customise it to ignore AI spam with custom filters + academic search + custom rankings + other custom tools. I can yeet domains from ever being seen again. It’s just very tailored to whatever you need. I hardly go elsewhere now. I find it curbs my compulsive rumination googling because I get clear, trustworthy answers and not AI telling me I have cancer or am distracted by something dramatic.
As a subscriber, one of the things I like about Kagi is how responsive the Kagi team is. I’ve reported a few bugs (4-5 maybe?) and they all got resolved fairly quickly. You can also find the founder on the Discord server talking with users. This was a breath of fresh air to me when I signed up.
I use Kagi too - they have a feature I haven’t seen before where you can basically optimize your own SEO. You can uprank or downrank any given website to varying degrees based on how much of that site you want to see in your future search results (I use this a lot for game wikis that have since migrated off of Fandom etc, but the stale Fandom page always shows up first in google search).
They’re also working on a feature to warn you which articles are paywalled directly from the search result, which I will use the hell out of.
They also have something they call Lenses, which are essentially search profiles that emphasize certain types of results (programming lens upranks stackoverflow, github, and API docs for instance).
All in all I’ve been extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the directions they’re exploring in. And being able to easily chat up the devs in discord doesn’t hurt either.
I had Kagi for a bit and enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I use search enough to justify the price tag.
I didn’t know about the personalized SEO thing- I wonder if you could have a “default SEO rank” that would basically average all the specific uprank/downranks from other users. So power users tweak their algo, and everyone else gets the benefit of using that human feedback to improve their results.
if you’re willing to help at all we’re always looking for feedback on specific results, and also have this page for testing staging algorithms, there’s a big change on there currently. No bother if not.
People aren’t comparing it to alternatives, they’re comparing it to Google 5-10 years ago.
Google used to be astoundingly good at figuring out what it was you wanted, and finding out for you. Now there’s a lot more SEO garbage and meaningless fluff clogging every results page, and if your search could even remotely be related to buying something, it’s only products and ads.
Dude, I switched from Google for the first time in my life a couple months ago because I couldn’t take it anymore.
Ads, ads, ads, ads, ads, ads, ads
Ai articles, Ai articles, Ai articles, Ai articles, Ai articles
The fact that google has a built-in graphing calculator just isn’t worth it.
I won’t forget this, actually: I was looking up what to do next in a game I was playing—very deliberately, I care a lot about spoilers—and the “people also ask” section implied, for no reason, this had nothing to do with what I wanted to know, that a character who died really early on apparently has things to say in chapter 9.
I had not so good experiences with Contabo lately. Lot of outages and they withdrew 2 more month after the end of my subscription. Ionos had no outtages so far (5th month). In addition their web interface is better than Contabos.
There is actually a lot more search engines that you might think, plus there are privacy frontends for them you can aggregate.
Edit: Also the main poin’t of searxng is to use it as a proxy for them which hepps if you use an instance with multiple users, or host an instance for you and your friends for example.
I don’t need a 27-page novel to know the temperature and time to cook something. I also don’t want to he directed to Pintrest and be required to have an account. Honestly, I’ve started using Bing more often.
No joke, Bing Chat is considerably better at finding answers than any search engine I’ve used in recent years. I don’t even bother googling things anymore. Just ask the AI.
I’m just starting to learn HTML and oh my fucking god do I LOVE chatGPT… Holy hell… I can’t even begin to express just how amazing it is to be able to ask basic questions and not only get a reply, but provide example code, and it will elaborate or be as concise as you like… I LOVE IT! I’m especially happy to see they don’t ask for your phone number and other absurdly intrusive unnecessary information anymore. That’s what kept me away at first.
I do know it’s not infallible and I probably won’t use it as much as I move on to more complex programming.
I do fairly complex programming and still use chat gpt. It will contribute to be helpful to say “write me a function that does this” rather than “how do I code this”
I would like a Firefox add-on that filters out sites where recipe ingredients are measured in cups and the recipes contain butter and sugar when they shouldn’t, thanks very much
Try Brave Search, Duckduckgo, Startpage, or Searxng. For more detail on these recommendation (that I definitely did not just steal), check out the Privacy Guides page, or The New Oil for a different, albeit overlapping, set of recommendations and take on search engines.
I mean I guess. They aren’t actively fighting or anything like that to my knowledge. I personally think the Privacy Guides is the better resource, because PrivacyTools has vpn recommendations like Nord and Surfshark with affiliate links that are not actively disclosed from my quick check.
No kidding. Just earlier today, I was looking for a kind of niche tool used to wrap pallets in plastic, and I found nothing on google about it. It kept showing me everything BUT what I was looking for.
On bing, I found just about all of the information I needed about it. Turns out it’s niche partially because it’s made in my province, which I also found out from bing. Almost no one knows what I’m referring to when I mention it. It combines the technology of machine wrapping and hand wrapping, and it makes warehousing much easier sometimes. I wanted to recommend it to someone. Thanks Bing!
Is it much different from a pallet wrapper? A big platform you can set a pallet on loaded with stuff and it spins? And you hold what’s like a yard wide rolling pin with plastic wrap on it to wrap the pallet as it spins?
Yeah honestly. The Google ad-based search system created a set of incentives that just destroyed the internet! I miss the days when people created their own fun little quirky websites like Ian’s Shoelace Site. That used to be every site on the internet!
DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.
SearXNG has maximum privacy and results, but it’s a bit too complicated for the average person. DuckDuckGo has worse results than google because of Bing base, Startpage is similar to DuckDuckGo, but it has as good results as google. Brave search has good results and is not reliant on other search engines.
I used to have my default engine set to ecosia. I loved it, but their recent change in their privacy policy about giving information to Google was a big no-no for me.
I’ve been quite liking Kagi (paid). No search manipulation, no ads, good results, no tracking, no tying search to accounts, you can modify results yourself (remove pintrist, facebool results; pin Wikipedia results to the top of results; boost sites in your results that you use heavily, etc).
I’ve been using it for like, 5 months now? Rarely need to use bangs, the search is pretty damn good.
Kagi seems to be the real deal. I’d say anecdotally it cuts my searches in half (If I had to do 4-6 searches to find something previously, now it’s 2-3 max). Sometimes I will find myself accidently on DDG and I’ll think, “Wow, why are these results all over the place?” DDG still edges out Google and Bing (actually I think it uses Bing as a backend for certain tasks).
I tried Kagi briefly and the results were as good as google. Searches for stuff near me, programming questions, and travel related stuff were not helpful.
I live in Canada, so I wonder if there’s some sort of regional prioritization.
I have searched for stuff in AHK, VB.net (helping a friend poke at code), and Lua (game stuff for myself), and it’s been okay, but I don’t code ‘real’ things anymore, kinda burnt out as a hobby a few years ago. I’m stateside.
I would say that there isn’t currently a “best alternative” but rather there is a small group of alternatives that each seem to have “use cases” as it were (shocker, kind of how it used to be in the 90s/00s before Google dominance). But even from person to person, people disagree on what the best use case for each is.
There’s some focused more on “privacy” like DuckDuckGo and searX.
I’ve heard Bing has pretty good results for anything AI related for all Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI.
I’ve heard good things about Qwant for music searches.
Someone else here in this thread just brought up Mojeek, which is supposed to be also privacy focused but includes searching by “emotion.”
Presearch is decentralized, but I haven’t looked “under the hood” of how its decentralization works.
Startpage is Google search results but behind a proxy so Google isn’t getting your info when you search.
I mean, it seems like there’s a lot of decent alternatives. I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left of the shell of Yahoo! started investing in trying to outperform Google at this point.
I’ve had a lot of issues with Bing, although it may have improved since I was really using it. AI has a tendency to “hallucinate,” which is a problem if you are interested in results that well… exist.
I’ve heard far more people using it for helping with simple coding exercises and helping them approach coding problems than I have heard of people using it for research.
I wouldn’t be doing much of any research through AI for exactly that reason myself. It hallucinates too much.
So, like I said, it depends on what you’re using each one for. People seem to be having success with Bing and programming, but less so with Bing and anything actually human-life related.
When people search, we believe they’re really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, lyrics, weather, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (e.g., Tripadvisor), content site (e.g., Musixmatch), or dedicated source (e.g., Dark Sky) that does a better job of actually answering searches than a general search engine can with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources.
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
Partners and Privacy: As per our strict privacy policy, we never share any personal information with any of our partners that could lead to the creation of search histories. When we send a request to a partner for information used in search results, the transfer of information is proxied through our servers so it stays anonymous. That means our partners see those requests as though they came from us instead of our users, and no unique identifiers are passed in that process (e.g., your IP address). That way, we can work with partners to produce relevant search result pages, while keeping you anonymous to them (and us!).
So they use some in-house tools and they source other results “largely” from Bing.
This might just be the best solution to keep things slightly more honest online though. With SEO targeting THE single search engine, it’ll forever get gamed by irrelevant/ad based results. If everyone uses different search engines then SEO starts to fall apart
I am constantly evangelizing Kagi to all my tech friends. Thankfully I don’t use mint or do CrossFit otherwise I’d be 3 for 3 and lonely. That said, it is really nice to have actual search results again. I toggle over to DDG when I have more ad based results in mind but avoid Google Search at all costs.
A typical example is more popular searches crowding out actual answers to your question.
I have had this a lot of times with IT problems, I am a sys admin and google a ton of things related to my job. But 5 out of 10 times some keyword will relate to a simple problem many people have with their pc and all relative answers to my exact question get drowned out.
Google anything related to ‘laptop monitor turn off’ and you will only find results telling you how to turn of sleep when you close the lid. No matter how much syntaxing or formatting you do with your search
You’re a Systems Administrator, but Google Tier 2 issues, do you provide break fix support? I thought as a SA you would be working behind the scenes on systems (apps), servers, etc.
Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn’t my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking “this is obviously a problem with $system, let’s just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!” And then we get the fun job of proving it’s not us and has no relation to us.
We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them…
I think this is a training issue that needs to be resolved at the Helpdesk level. I understand that nobody is perfect but if you keep seeing tickets like that - Helpdesk managers need to update their training modules and start tweaking the Helpdesk system to have service requests go to the proper groups. Incident tickets are another story but that’s where the training comes in.
I’m not even a sysadmin, just a power user and this infuriates me to no end. I gave up on a search just a couple days ago because I kept getting bottom tier answers. Like thanks but I already know how to use my computer, now tell me how to fix this problem.
C’mon now. “Laptop monitor turn off” has never generated a good result, even in the before time. I share the question: what are these people searching for that Google is generally yielding worse results than other engines? For anything sysadmin, IT-related, or any sort of troubleshooting, I’ve always needed to be creative to get to the good stuff.
C’mon now. “Laptop monitor turn off” has never generated a good result
That’s not what they’re saying. They mean that if your search contains that or is somewhat adjacent (despite being more specific), your results will be drowned in it. For example, if you had something like “laptop monitor turn off when bla bla bla”, 90% of the results will completely ignore what you’ve added.
I’ve got to deal with the same shit whenever I have to deal with complicated programming questions. Half the results will be related to some really basic mistake on the user’s side that I haven’t done, and I’ll need to spend a lot of time trying to find the magical word combination that doesn’t trigger those non-related issues and actually show me what I need.
Google straight up lies to me about movies an actor has been in, almost every time. “Wow, I had no idea Robert Downey Jr was in Mean Girls! Who did he play?” checks imdb “no he fuckin wasn’t wtf google” (this is an arbitrary example I just made up because I don’t feel like finding a real one right now)
Right. I just think it was overly ambitious. It’s right just enough to earn trust and wrong just enough to burn you. I had a really, really dumb argument once because of that feature
Is he not slated for season two? I thought that robot he voiced was going to be in it, I remember reading some article months ago though I admit I only have a passing interest in the show.
I see speculation but nothing solid. I think google is pulling from the rumors, which it really shouldn’t. If he is slated then that’s fine, let me know if you find anything
Me not caring enough to confirm if Alan Tudyk is going to be in the second season of a show I haven't even watched is not a good excuse for you to just make up shit to try to make a point.
you are spreading made up shit as we speak to prove your own point, and you’re very rude. you have reached a conclusion and think anyone who disagrees with you is either a liar or stupid. bye
I don't ever remember calling you a liar or stupid, but okay. Also not sure what made up thing I said, or what point I'm trying to prove. I kinda think we are having two completely different conversations.
Open Watcom is a compiler for DOS. Every search engine will try ten ways to politely tell you that you obviously meant Wacom tablets, you illiterate goblin, and then shrug and direct you to the project’s own single-page FAQ.
Asking questions about DOS itself is even worse. Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but “how to use a terminal window in Windows.” Or at best, Ralph Brown’s big fat interrupt list, rearranged into the most Geocities-ass jumble of pages, where you can easily look up what any specific hex code does, once you already know which code to look for.
Yet if I enter something like ‘resolv’ in Google I need to add ‘-resolve’ to not get hundreds of unrelated results… Same goes for any not-too-popular software that is named a slight misspelling of their purpose… I even find it ridiculous how often first results litterally say underneath they did not contain your query…
But with terabox and “content plaza” it gives 2 results?
Startpage I have no idea, but I’m guessing they, like many, use the Google API for webcrawler results… 1 result? Those are pretty common words,…
What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now? Independent blogs are as good as dead, and social networks are walled gardens, sometimes populated by self regurgitating robots.
What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now?
Plenty of high quality user generated content live on Discord, Slack, and other semi-private information exchanges that aren’t as easy to parse and scrape. Places like Reddit and Stack Exchange and DeviantArt are just the prior-gen iteration of hosting for those conversations. But they’re being overwhelmed with bots, marketing teams, special interest mods, and ideologues to the point that they can only deliver a very niche set of content catering to whomever “owns” the space.
It used to be, I’d start at DDG andwhen I didn’t find my results, I’d switch to Goog. Now I do this, but when I find even worse results on Google, I switch back to DuckDuck because query wrangling on DDG is more worthwhile. The starting results may not always be good on DDG, but they’re often better than Google.
However, very recently I’ve been starting on Searx on doing follow-up checks on Bing, and this has been working pretty well. I know DDG has to show ads, but lately they seem to take up the better part of the first page and aren’t helpful.
Google is completely out of the picture. Their results are just bad.
I use Google search when I want to buy something, for some reason, it gets good résultats when I want to buy from my country. but if you want reliable results for a product review, you have to look elsewhere.
This is such an apt analogy. I only use it because I have a couple hundred tabs open in Chrome and I am too lazy to port them all over to FF. Even then, I usually have to be really manipulative to the search algorithm to get what I want from general searches and heaven forbid I want to find something that is even the least but taboo. I just use DuckDuckGo for those searches, though it struggles sometimes too.
I know I need to swap over to FF entirely, but there is just so much, from shifting my PW bank to the hundreds of tabs and thousands of bookmarks. Does anyone know of any FOSS or FF extensions that can smooth that process?
Firefox doesn’t need extensions to handle the password and bookmark imports, it can do those automatically. I saw someone suggest you create a folder in your bookmarks that is your open tabs, bookmark each tab as you close them, import passwords and bookmarks, and open that folder for a relatively painless migration.
Do not rely on the built-in password managers to keep your passwords safe. Use a purpose-built one like Bitwarden to generate unique ones, save and complete them, agnostic to the browser. Virtually every stealer out there can easily grab the built-in password db’s content.
Bit-warden for password manager, FOSS cross platform. FF should import all the bookmarks. I’d save all open tabs to a new bookmark folder before transfer then open that folder after.
I liked kagi for the first couple months I had it but then I noticed the results seems to be getting worse. Google tier. I cancelled because why pay for that?
I’m not sure if the results were better at first or whether I just noticed flaws more the longer I used it.
I’m often not even bothering to search for technical issues now. There’s been a big mindset shift in me. If I can’t figure it out on my own then pack it up and move on to the next thing. It’s a 5050 shot at best whether you’ll get help on a forum and search is a dumpster fire everywhere. I’m learning a lot more this way and retaining but fuck me running is it ever frustrating
It’s not really the ads on Google Search itself that break it.
It’s that almost every result is some automatically generated spam created entirely in response to Google’s algorithms. And it’s those pages that are covered in ads. Google broke the internet.
You can still get what you’re looking for, but I home in on results that look like forums or other actual user generated content. Didn’t even realise I was doing it tbh. I just mentally filter out most of the shit.
yup, nowadays if you don’t add “@r*ddit” to a tech related search in google you’ll get 10 seemingly copy pasted results that look like “1. download our drivers updater :))) 2. if you don’t want to do that, just give up lol”
Everything is a bot that gives you four paragraphs of text about how they’re a certified Microsoft Windows professional technician, but all they ever do is tell you to run sfc /scannow.
Same here. I almost responded asking what the issue is when I realized I query Google Search with specific keywords and cheats, ignoring all the bs in the list. At some point I just adapted and didn’t notice.
Now that I think about it there have been a few times where I’ve had to struggle to find something, especially if it is medical related. Gotta give old Reddit this: It’s been around so long with so much activity that you can at least get pointed in the right direction by throwing it into a search and hitting enter.
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