What search engine do you use?

Does anyone care to explain the possible reason for downvoting this - is there something I am not aware of wrt DDG?
- It's based on Bing from what I recall, and it's not necessarily the most accurate engine. I tried it for a few months and couldn't replace Google with it unfortunately.

DuckDuckGo

I used to have to put !g (redirect to Google) on like half my searches to get the results I wanted. These days, I actually generally prefer DDG's results over Google's.
I use DDG too. When I redirect to google using !g it's usually out of desperation and it gives me the same bad results in a slightly different order.
I use this on my phone. It's gotten pretty great!

Searxng

I've begun to pay for Kagi.com

I wouldn't say that it "blows my mind" or anything, but simply that it seems to work as expected (which is more than what I can say for Google). There's also a "Fediverse" button on Kagi.com, so it can search lemmy.world (and more??).

I'm just annoyed by the regions issues, you'll get pretty biased results depending in what region you select.
If you try to search for something specific to a region with other selected you'll find sometime empty results, which shows you won't get relevant results about a search if you don't properly select the region.

Probably this is more obvious with non technical searches, for example my default region is canada-en and if I try "instituto nacional electoral" I only get a wiki page, an international site and some other random sites with no news, only when I change the region I get the official page ine.mx and news. For me this means kagi hides results from other regions instead of just boosting the selected region's ones.
- Yeah that drives me nuts too. Shopping results for fuckin Home Depot? I'm in Europe you stupid search engine
I'm using kagi as well and have been very pleased with it.
Their scumbag CEO really soured kagi for me
- Explain? I haven't heard anything negative

Searxng.

Kagi. I like it

I just started using this and am still in the trial period but I will definitely be paying for it when my 100 free searches are gone. So many top results are exactly what I'm looking for. I can't believe my expectations have been conditioned to the point where this surprises me...
- Yea it hasn't disappointed me so far, I'm also still in the trial, been waiting for a search that turns crap results on G and DDG to try and put it through the paces. Though compared to G it is nice not having half the results be sponsored.
I’ve heard enough bad things about it to stay well away. Which is too bad bc it’s quite good atm! I just expect it to hoover up my data & get enshittified sooner than later & the CEO is Musk-level BSer 🤷‍♂️👍
- What have you heard and where? I've not seen anything that indicates either of those things

I use my own self hosted SearXNG.

Same, it's super simple with Docker and you don't even need to fiddle with ports or anything. I should probably try running it at my work PC now that I think of it.. Anyway, duckduckgo has been good to me for all these years.
- I run a "public" instance with basic auth so I can use it from anywhere (phone, work). I've made my instance my default search engine everywhere. (I know basic auth is not the most secure but I wouldn't even really care it other people used my instance; I just don't want it hammered.)
- How much ram does the container use on average?
Why the -ng-?
- It's a better fork of SearX

I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.

DuckDuckGo as a default with Google as fallback depending on what I'm looking for. For lemmy the default search of my instance works well enough so haven't tried external engines.

Pro tip: if you add !g to your search results in DuckDuckGo, it returns Google results
- Yeah that's what I usually do
Same. I have had particularly poor results on image searches from duckduckgo. It's on par or superior to Google for general web searches, but man, Google image search is still better

Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.

Theoretical search: "slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie"
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever "celebrities" have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.

slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie

DDG results weren't too bad, although repetitious and focused on the history of the gag, and not particular examples.
Per Brave:

slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie

The classic comedy gag of slipping on a banana peel has been a staple in entertainment for decades. In the 1980s, this gag was featured in several comedy movies. One notable example is the 1983 film “Trading Places” starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. In the movie, a character played by Jamie Lee Curtis slips on a banana peel, leading to a series of comedic events.

Another example is the 1985 film “The Sure Thing” starring John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga. In this movie, a character played by John Cusack slips on a banana peel while trying to impress a girl, leading to a series of awkward and humorous moments.

The banana peel gag has also been featured in several other 1980s comedy movies, including “The Blues Brothers” (1980) and “Caddyshack” (1980). These films showcase the enduring popularity of this comedic trope and its ability to bring laughter and entertainment to audiences.

AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts. Learn more
- To add, second result in Brave:
  
  https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=slipping-on-a-banana-peel
Kagi:

Quick Answer

Based on the available information, the "slipping on a banana peel" gag has been a staple of comedy films since the early 20th century. The first known appearance of this gag on the big screen was in the Charlie Chaplin movie "By the Sea", where Chaplin's character "The Tramp" tosses a banana peel on the ground and then slips on it later. [1][2]

The banana peel gag was soon adopted by other silent film stars like Buster Keaton, who featured it in his 1928 film "The Cameraman". [3] The gag continued to be used in comedy films throughout the 20th century, including in the 1926 Harold Lloyd film "For Heaven's Sake". [4]

However, the available information does not mention any specific 1980s comedy movies that featured the banana peel gag. The gag seems to have been more prevalent in the silent film era and earlier decades of the 20th century. [1][5]

The Origin of the “Slipping on a Banana Peel” Comedy Gag

Chaplin and the first banana peel slip in film history - YouTube

Buster Keaton slips on a banana peel in The Cameraman (1928)

Slipping on a banana peel - 3 versions of the classic joke - YouTube

How Did Slipping on a Banana Peel Become a Comedy

I'm mainly using duckduckgo for 7 years now. If I can't find something with it, I try startpage, which sometimes helps.

Ecosia. These days it's better than Google.

Which isn't better than Google these days? They dropped immensly in quality.

Kagi

Kagi. I haven't had a failed search results in months, and when I do google can't find it either so I haven't lost anything.

A combination of SearXNG and Stract, for the most part. They're definitely not perfect (yet), but they mostly get the job done! And I think they both have a lot of cool filters and refinement settings that I haven't even taking advantage of so far.

For niche stuff it seems like a lot of hyper targeted search engines are popping up, like Sepia Search for PeerTube.

Yesterdsy I stumbled over this: www.mojeek.com Apparently has its own index.

this is correct 😀
- Mama, look at me. I'm talking to a .com-owner!!
  
  You are awesome for providing an alternative. Would you mind letting me know what's the average monthly cost running your infrastructure and if you are paying it as individuals ?

Kagi.

I know, I know... I just really like it.

Really? I tried the trial and didn't find it that much better than DDG... Specially not $10 a month for life better
- I personally find it much better than DDG, and only a slight improvement over Brave. DDG's reliance on Bing leaves me !banging my way out almost half the time.
- I found it slightly better. I also find the entire user experience appealing, so that adds some points. I use web search dozens of times a day for work, so it's worth it for me.
  
  I probably would go back to 100% DDG if I stop working in tech.

Perplexity

I switch back and forth between DDG and Perplexity. When I quickly want to look something up I find Perplexity quite helpful, just get the answer without filtering through search results.

Since you mentioned not knowing if this is the right community. For any question where you dont know where it goes [email protected] usually catches everything. Theres also some other question coms at [email protected] and [email protected] but theyre more specific. I can leave this one here though, its fine (especially since theres a bunch of info here now)

I'm using Kagi. I find that it does a better job at finding "legitimate" sites rather than blogspam and content marketing. However I'm not sure I will stick with it a long time. I seems like it has mostly stalled and the team is getting distracted by making a browser, non-relevant AI (I have no problem with the few AI experiments tied to searching) and other side projects. We'll see. I really hope that they pull themselves together and focus or it might not last. But for now they seem like one of the better options available.

Bing's new "Deep Search" where it has some sort of LLM refinement iteration process has also been helpful sometimes. Probably the best AI search product I have seen, but definitely doesn't replace most searches for me.

I'm avoiding the major search engines. If I really need a search engine, I use DuckDuckGo. Most of the time, search forms of a few websites provide better results. I've bookmarked search forms of e.g. wikipedia, Wiktionary, the python docs, Arch Linux wiki, github, dict.leo.org, bug trackers of software I commonly use (such as Mozilla's bug tracker) and so on. I'm basically using Firefox's "keyword" search feature in the way DuckDuckGo's !bang syntax works.

startpage.com or duckduckgo.

Recently started using startpage and it seems pretty decent.

MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer

It currently supports the following languages/regions:

Dansk (Danmark)

Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)

English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)

Español (España/México)

Suomalainen (Suomi)

Français (Canada/France)

Italiano (Italia)

Nederlands (Nederland)

Polski (Polska)

Svenska (Sverige)

Source: https://metager.org/lang

There is a TOR-hidden service too:

https://metager.org/tor

It is open source:

https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer

And has other useful features, for example:

That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.

Source: https://metager.org/tips

Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:

https://searx.space

Qwant

I've been using Qwant as well and it's actually really refreshing. No nonsense and I feel like I get better results than Kagi and Google and Bing.

I love it so far.
- There are some times when Qwant returns bad results where I'll revert to Google. Just to find worse results...
  
  Jokes aside, Qeant handles most queries well, even local stuff in my native language.

Google. I usually find what I want with it, although it has gotten worse over time.

I tried DDG a few years ago and only found it worse. Like, there was a clear performance impact with me using DDG vs me using Google.

Same. Once every few months I give DDG another try for a week or two, but between their strictly inferior and more spam riddled results and the absolutely grotesquely bad Apple Maps they integrate, it's back to Google pretty quickly.

It's like that study found out: Yeah, Google results have objectively gotten worse. But so have Bing's and by extension DDG's, and more so than Google's.
- absolutely grotesquely bad Apple Maps they integrate
  
  You can use !maps query to workaround that. I typically end up using DDG as a frontend to other sites through its bangs syntax.
  
  E.g.
  
  !maps x location to y location
  
  But yeah, if normal DDG results don't work for you it's probably not a huge gain.

You.com was pretty good for highly technical topics, otherwise Google

Edit: use a VPN from the EU for Google, you'll get better search results

I used DuckDuckGo a couple of years ago, but they added their own blacklist of sites (pretty stupid), and for my language it started returning crappy generated spam sites instead of relevant results. They shouted at the top of their lungs that for my language they simply index the results from Yandex, but this is a lie, they are different.

StartPage gave the best results, but they introduced a captcha that I got every damn request.

I'm currently using SearXNG, which collects results from Google. And these are damn normal results, unlike other search engines that consider themselves the smartest and edit the results.

Phind.com is pretty good for programming stuff, it's AI but it cites it's sources.

Shameless self promo: I was upset by this as well so I’m working now on a curated search engine just for anything related to webdev. It focuses on blogs and docs. No BS, just high quality sources.

https://kukei.eu

Also it’s hosted on a PC in my living room ;)

If you mean for programming specifically, I... don't, really. At most it would be for a quick sanity check on syntax in a language I don't write often, for which Google is fine. But otherwise I rely on documentation and search features of the various language/tool-specific websites.

Anyone have any experience with Swisscows?

Not perfect:
But here are some ideas.

reddit (tor)
wikipedia (tor)
certain niche direct sources (tor)

More ideal ideas:

certain specific private source (maybe tor). Not reliable but high quality.
large collection of raw links ( requires labor, skill. And yields imperfect results )
searx ( mainly to share with friends and as a fallback. it is a pretty great premade metasearch engine when selfhosted)
ready-to-go foss searchengine implementations. (Limited in scope, requires decent amount of "labor" and time. Requires setup phase and light maintaining. Extremely high quality results. Optionally invest money in various ways to supercharge. Perhaps recruit collaborators)

other stuff:

creating private collections and bookmarks
not using internet or using rarely or using in cautious way. Or not using www.
focusing on distracting self with hands-on projects.

What am i actually using at this point? (Nothing is set up currently!).

Sometimes i use tor 70% of the time. Sometimes i use tor 30% of the time.
very frequently non www .
duckduckgo when needed. [Often] without visiting the links
niche sources (2, ..)
reddit

*this isnt perfect! but i think overall i think i dont spend much time traveling to websites for info.

Historically:

searx
searchengine
dabble in scaling.

Future:

selfhost
scaling
further isolation
IRL
other stuff. such as creating new solutions.

There is certainly room for immediate improvement here.
Im just lazy.

I dont need the internet as much as the internet needs me.

Brave

I used to use Duck Duck Go, but it's supposedly not as private as it claims to be, and my understanding is Brave is a bit better there.

I don't use the Brave browser tho, just the search engine

None, I find it myself.

I'm genuinely curious about this. Do you just stick to sites you know? Do you randomly try web addresses when you're looking for something new?
- I was joking.
amateur. I just manifest the correct IP address for my desired resource and fetch it with curl