I have been using duckduckgo. I personally think it's pretty good. So much so, that I think I have used it for 10 years now.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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Same here, but it has also gone bad IMO.
Guess all the fake sites really got em all this time.
Browser: Firefox because I can download its source code, use it, inspect, modify and share. All of these 4 freedoms make Firefox free, as in freedom. ~~Brave is non-free (closed source and not contributing to software freedom)~~.
I use Qwant (unfortunately, it only works in the EU) and site-local search (Wikipedia, ArchWiki, etc.)
All web search engines are crap, honestly. Maybe Kagi makes better, idk.
EDIT: Brave is free, apparently.
Could you please elaborate why Brave isn't open source? The source code is on github and there's even an Brave-Git package in the AUR.
Kagi! Worth every penny of the subscription. The emphasis on privacy is a big deal for me but the killer feature is the ability to customize results. I have sites I personally like/trust towards the top and have an ever growing blacklist of sites that don't get shown at all. No more pinterest, spruce, or other seo spam sites!
I tried for years to breakup with Google search, but always kept coming back to it for one reason or another. I started using Kagi a few months ago and have not even thought about Google since then. I really canβt recommend it enough, especially now that the $10/month plan is unlimited searches.
Good to hear that they updated their model
But doesn't that naturally just recreate an even more personalised and hence affirming echo chamber the like of the algorithms on Google or Bing or so usually do?
Granted, plenty Spam sites to exclude, but is it easy to keep it to just those?
This is an interesting observation, not really something I have considered. The key difference here is that you are the one in control of those customizations. Whether the customizations are useful or harmful is entirely up to the user, Kagi just gives you the option.
For me at least, the majority of my searches I just want the correct answer to a question or a link to a specific resource I'm looking for. I don't really use it as a content discovery engine. Being able to prioritize sites that I have found through experience to have reliable results and exclude sites that are uninformative or irritating is valuable.
Just the ability to replace items URLs in the result is such a great feature. I get rid of all Google / bing AMP stuff, reroute all Reddit answers to old.Reddit etc.
Kagi is great
Your question seems to be confusing between browser and search engine. These are two separate pieces of software.
But to answer both:
- Browser: Firefox. Google has demonstrated clearly that they cannot be trusted as the sole owner of the web which is what is about to happen as Chromium (which Brave is based on) fully takes over. Mozilla (makers of Firefox) is the last holdout. If you care, this is case in point about how Google having a monopoly on browsers will kill the free web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity.
- Search engine: Another +1 for Kagi. It has completely replaced Google for me.
I personally use Ecosia, it's got a pretty decent privacy policy (esp compared to google/microsoft) and it uses Bing's index so the results are pretty good. The main selling point is they use 100% of their profits for planting trees. The quality of the results is 99% of the time fine but if I ever get something I can't find (or if I'm doing an image search) you can just add #g to your search to search google.
It's overall a pretty good search engine by itself, but the fact it plants trees pushes it leagues ahead of the others for me
Do you run an adblocker?
edit: because if you do, then your searches don't contribute towards the tree planting
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SearXNG. It'll search all the other engines for you, in a privacy preserving way.
Caveat that it is only privacy preserving if you trust whoever is hosting it.
The solution to that is to host it yourself. A VPS with 2GB RAM would be would be more than sufficient for SearxNG, and you can often find those for around $15/year (see GreenCloudVPS budget KVM line, RackNerd sales, other hosts on LowEndTalk). Or, you could run it on a Raspberry Pi, especially now that Raspberry Pis are more accessible and not out of stock everywhere.
Be careful though. Self hosting is addictive. You start with one service on a low-end VPS or Raspberry Pi, then you outgrow the server, expand, and eventually end up in !selfhosted@lemmy.world with a full-size server rack in your house.
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Iβve been using DuckDuckGo for a while now, and while it works great for searches in English, Iβve had some problems with my native language (Finnish). However, with the use of bangs, this downside can be mitigated.
It was an great moment when I learned that bangs exist. I only use two or three but it's still amazing.
Search engine or browser? For browsers Iβll use Firefox, but if Iβm logging into anything Iβll usually use Chrome or Safari. Iβll also use Tor browser sometimes.
On the search engine side, Iβll generally use DuckDuckGo but Iβm trying out Kagi to see if itβs worth paying for.
Askjeeves
Excite!
My mum used Excite for a long time, well into the late 2000s and early 2010s. It was sort of frozen in time, at least for Australian users. Search still worked well enough, but the news articles on the homepage hadn't been updated in over 5 years.
Theyβre just repackaging AltaVista results.
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I'm another Kagi fan - after customising it a little it's just so good, and I haven't even played with features like lenses.
I really like the custom bang searches (e.g. I could make !ks gravity search on simple Wikipedia), especially on mobile since Firefox Android doesn't support the normal browser quicksearches (where you set a keyword for each search).
Any love for qwant?
4get.ca, it's a metasearch engine, you can use it to get results from different search engines without trackers and anonymously
Google's localization is much better than any search engines I've tried.
For any given query, if you're not satisfied with the first results out of one search engine, try two competing ones. Next time you have a search, begin with whatever one did the best on your previous search. Iterate. Record and publish your results.
Folks were unsatisfied with AltaVista and Lycos; that's how Google won for a while. At one point, Yahoo stood for "You Always Have Other Options". You still do.
For work I still use Google tbh. It's still really good for technical answers
I switched to Brave Search after watching Techlore's video about it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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