No Stupid Questions

I find all the kagi mentions to be very suspicious

Technically the best one was Altavista.

But they are long gone because they came from the old academic & idealistic internet and they never learned to survive in that internet where money rules.

Many people keep asserting that DuckDuckGo is as useless as Google, but I haven’t had a single issue with it. Could it be a regional thing?

I self-host a SearXNG instance and it works really well.

https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker

Here are some options I use in my rotation.

Brave Search (skip the browser)

Mojeek

Qwant (French)

Yandex (Russian)

Mullvad Leta (Mullvad VPN subscription required)

MetaGer (German meta search)

Startpage (Private Google results)

DuckDuckGo (Private Bing results)

SearXNG and similar self hosted options are awesome, but I’ve found them unreliable.

Be skeptical of Kagi… It’s promoted pretty heavily around here for something that’s not FOSS.

Yandex was way better for searches in russian sources, but it came to shit just like google and also excludes whatever russian government don't like at that point. I searched for some software in it multiple timea and the first link was some noname, probably malware site. It also promotes it's own malware like browser with questionable russian security sertificates and their own Alexa. I'd honestly not include it in any list.

I like DDG and don't switch from it that much. I've also heard Kagi as paid search engine is good, but I've never tried it.

Kagi

I've found duckduckgo works fine for things that aren't recent.

Controversially the bing gpt chat bot works alarming well.

I self host a searxng instance and I find the combination of bing, duckduckgo and qwant as the source engines to return decent results. You can use a public instance and choose those engines in settings.

This site collects quite a few web search engines: https://www.searchenginemap.com/

For everyone who uses searxng, is it great for day to day browsing? Do I require to host my own instance or the setup is as easy as requiring to add "searxng" option on my browser app?

I'm interested to move away from google as it becomes shitty everyday and loses its effectiveness for advanced query (based on my own result compared during 2013 up to pre covid). Bing have weird result on my region so cannot use it, ddg only for occasional use.

Thanks!

Is "super SEO sites" a catch all term for those 99% filler websites that have a tomato soup recipe (in theory) but actually start out with, "Historical evidence seems to suggest that the tomato was first cultivated in the territory that would eventually become Guam back in 1464..."

I've wondered if we had a common reference term for those? I wish it didn't have a positive connotation though...

Kagi is the highest quality for sure. There isn't a better one, I have tried all of them except perplexity, and that's more like chat gpt rather than search.

Even though there's a small monthly cost, the results have been consistent for Kagi. But consistency meets only half of my needs for search: I also want to make decisions quickly from what I find within the contents. If I were to to go to a link, wait for it to load, scroll the content, etc. -- does that listed forum post have the answer I am looking for? Does this news article cover the nuances I have been tracking and would like to read more of? Kagi offers an AI-based summarize feature that helps. And that's been meeting the other half of my needs, as well.

EDIT, an opinion: Search services may well be eventually replaced by small, niche LLMs trained to perform summerization tasks, such as Consensus, which I have used for work research, and Perplexity.ai. The AI summarize feature of Kagi is why I see the service as more useful than straight indexes, even when self-hosted. Kagi is a stepping stone toward this for me, and why I recommend it.

Come on over to Kagi! You do have to pay but I use a search engine dozens of times per day so I’m not too bothered by it.