this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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I'll go first. I've used a lot of search engines, I used duckduckgo for quite some time but found their search results kinda bad. I'm currently using ecosia the search results are similar to ddg's but at least I'm planting trees, so there's that.

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[–] noodlejetski@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

DuckDuckGo. I can't live without !bangs.

[–] GoochGuardian@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you mean like !google or !amazon ? I use ddg. Just making sure I know what you mean

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[–] ggt@lemmy.fmhy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Kagi. Yes, it's paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:

  • Actual privacy
  • No BS like with DDG
  • AI features (like a "quick answer" feature that's really useful)
  • Has its own index along with others
  • Search results are great, probably better than DDG's
  • "Lenses" (basically narrow results by a set of sites)
  • Devs are pretty cool
[–] howdy@thesimplecorner.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

For some reason the thought of a paid search engine has never even crossed by mind before. I've been using DDG but this has peaked my curiosity. Thank you.

Edit: The pricing is... very... meh.

[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 2 points 1 year ago

It's so worth it.

[–] ggt@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

It is very meh. But I think if you're able to, it's well worth the price. Just don't get the standard plan. That one is god awful.

[–] pumpkin@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I didn't know it was privacy focused or that they were building their own index, that's really cool. Do you think it's worth the money?

[–] zarquon@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

It's only a few bucks a month. I think so.

The only thing I don't like is needing to be logged in to search. That always feels like a huge invasion of privacy. The at least claim that they don't log search contents though

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[–] bit@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Kagi is absolutely wonderful. Highly recommend giving it ago. Gives me better results than google while having a fair privacy policy

[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 2 points 1 year ago

Love Kagi. I switched and never had any reason to use Google again. Its that good.

[–] DengueDucky@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I want to give it a try but it's hard to justify the cost with limited searches. I don't want to have to keep track of how many times I've searched or second guess if I "really need to search for that".

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[–] gibandaley@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

DuckDuckGo, but I've been testing Qwant (also privacy focused) lately as well.

[–] theory@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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[–] deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

SearX-NG, coming off DuckDuckGo it wasn't a major change in the internal structure (the search gets relayed over to a larger search engine), but there's no one company behind it like DDG. They've been working together with Microsoft on some rather sketchy things.

I would still love to self-host something decent (that doesn't relay over to a company), but nothing like that exists as far as I know.

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[–] IuseArchbtw@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Startpage. It uses Googles results, but you will not get tracked that much

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[–] Steve@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I hate adds. I was using Neeva. Just switched to Kagi. After nearly 3 weeks, it looks like 300 searches/month will work for me. So $5 a month is fine.

[–] Rats@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Duckduckgo for the most part, especially if I already know where I want to get to. Google as a backup like others are saying.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago

Duck Duck Go. It just works for me. I've never had a problem with it's results.

[–] Adi2121@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been using SearXNG. It is a fork of SearX, a popular open source metasearch search engine. Basically SearX allows you to use multiple search engines for a search, and only the results are there, no ads. SearXNG changes the UI to be better, adds some other engines for a variety of things to search, like images. Currently I'm using ericafteric.top as my instance; it is the fastest US instance with search suggestions support since I can't selfhost.

[–] pimeys@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I run my own SearXNG instance too. I set it up to a Hetzner box, then blocked all ports from the firewall except on the Tailscale network. This means the machine which wants to use the search needs to be connected first to the same Tailscale network. It allows me to prevent being blocked by the search providers for too much traffic and is been working great. I just open http://SearXNG from my browser and start searching.

[–] mustyOrange@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Duck duck go first, and if results are shit, I default back to google

[–] cereals@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Most small search engines use bing results which are a hit or miss compared to Google.

Startpage is the only privacy focused one I found that uses Google search results. The UI is fine for the most part, except the image search maybe.

Edit: typo

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[–] JollyRoberts@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago
[–] CaptainEffort@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Just Google, unless I'm looking to pirate something. Then I use Yandex.

[–] Kissaki@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

DuckDuckGo

I also use Firefox search bookmarks for searching specific sites.

Search Bookmark: You prepare the URL with a %s placeholder and give the bookmark a tag, and you can type tag searchterm and it'll open it.

I'm using it for opening word definitions, word translations, searching reference documentation, searching specific platforms/websites/media types, etc.

Google. Sue me, I really only care about results when it comes to search. It's mostly just Google and Bing actually providing results and Google's are better.

[–] neblem@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

DDG first, Google if that fails and I think the query should have gotten good results, Bing Chat if I'm still really not sure about a topic or if I want some of its summarization (or I'm just feeling lazy).

[–] Candid_Technology_66@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

DuckDuckGo. I wanted something privacy-respecting, but Startpage was blocked in my country and SearX had problems with my language. Anyway I've heard an advertising company bought Starpage so I wont use it. Also bang shortcuts are great!

(Also is it just me or DDG doesn't approve new bangs now?)

[–] Geometric7792@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Google, because of inertia and not being given a good reason to switch.

duckduckgo primarily, but have been starting to dabble with a self hosted Whoogle.

[–] rhythmisaprancer@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Another DuckDuckGo user here. I really like it but wish I could use boolean with it.

[–] mego_pie@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

You can, it just works a bit differently than google if that is what you’re used to. It doesn’t outright exclude results with -, just de-emphasizes it in the results, of course with how tailored many web pages are to gaming search algorithms that doesn’t do much. If you want to outright eliminate certain websites from the search you can do that with -site:siteyouwantgone.here

[–] PhilL@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

Ecosia on my tablet because of nice integrated browser and DuckDuck+Firefox on the PC

Am also checking out Brave on PC at the moment

[–] Moonrise2473@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Bing because I'm getting paid for it

[–] Knuschberkeks@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

brave search on desktop, DDG on mobile.

[–] t0fr@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

DDG, it works well enough for me, and not that I got used to bangs I cannot let go of them

[–] Lyfja@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Duckduckgo, works like I want it to and it's not Google. Never had a problem with its search results either. Tried several others as well including searx and ecosia but I found their image search inferior to ddg's.

[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 3 points 1 year ago

Kagi is better though. I was using ddg for a long time but had to use Google now and then to get good results.

[–] Arimer@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

I use Brave Search. wAs going to switch to Neeva but they are shutting down now.

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