we all know Google’s usefulness has diminished if you’re searching for something the algorithm doesn’t have it’s nose on, personally i don’t feel searxng (i used the nicfab.eu one) gives the best or most useful results either, what’s out there?

  • @[email protected]
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    132 years ago

    Been using duckduckgo for years and generally gets the job done. If I want more local specific results then I’ll just add !g to my search which’ll do a Google search

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      Duck Duck Go is literally just Bing without the personal data. If it works for you then it works for you, but it’s good to know what you’re really using.

      • @[email protected]
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        122 years ago

        from wikipedia: 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.[62][3][63][64][53] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.[64][65]

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        I’m quite aware of that fact. Not sure where I gave the impression otherwise. When it comes down to it, pretty much all the options are just proxies/aggregators for other search engines - that introduce privacy.

      • Arisu
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        22 years ago

        Ever since Microsoft nuked it a couple years back (because results included csam) search has been heavily restricted and most definitely was shot in the ankle, used to use bing a lot to find older resources for stuff I needed, now I cannot use it for that any longer

    • @[email protected]
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      42 years ago

      Seconding Kagi. The pricing model is a little rough, but if you’re serious about getting the most out of a search engine, Kagi is the way to go.

      Imo, paying is worth it to be completely free of Google’s services.

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        Kagi is great but I feel they’ll struggle with their current pricing. I have a discounted rate for their pro tier, $10 for 1500 queries, and I think even that is expensive.

  • @[email protected]
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    62 years ago

    duckduckgo is the most useful and straightforward to use, brave isn’t bad either although it struggles with non english searches from my experience. searx is powerful but a bit overkill and it is not the most intuitive

  • @[email protected]
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    62 years ago

    DuckDuckGo works in 98% of the time for me. If I can’t find something on DDG, I’ll switch to Google. But that’s only rarely needed.

  • DARbarian
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    52 years ago

    searx.be is my favorite by far. You can get results from DDG, Brave, Startpage, etc. all in one place and it’s self-hostable

  • MusketeerX
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    32 years ago

    Great discussion.

    Because it’s happened gradually I’ve just gotten used to Google being less and less useful.

    It’s good to try something else.

    This thread made me try Perplexity, Kagi and SearXNG. I’ll give them all a run over the next week or so and see how they go.

  • Bri Guy
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    22 years ago

    eh, i’ve been doing a mix of duckduckgo or brave’s search engine. tbh it works for basic things but i’ve yet to find a better search engine for more niche or specific queries

  • @[email protected]
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    22 years ago

    I use Bing for Microsoft Rewards. You can get the equivalent of $10 a month in gift cards for your searches.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    I like Ecosia.

    It does run on Bing, but I like seeing the lil tree planting counter (⁠•⁠‿⁠•⁠)