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.

[–] pfjarschel@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Kagi has worked REALLY well for me for all topics, but it is a paid service...

[–] vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 10 months ago

You know the old saying, "you get what you paid for."

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 2 points 10 months ago

Time to bring back dogpile methinks

[–] DontMakeMoreBabies@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I fucking hate this this is a thing again... We got past this because it was fucking stupid to have to swap between AltaVista, Askjeeves, Yahoo, etc.

Now we're literally at the same point. Just like with streaming services and cable.

At this point I just think the average person is a moron and when enough of them adopt something it goes to shit.

[–] Velonie@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

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

[–] BossDj@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the info.

Is DDG just straight Bing results but private and maybe minus AI stuff?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's just a bit more complicated than that:

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.

In other words: