I don't understand why lots of you answer with chatGPT. It's not a search engine! And you shouldn't use it like a search engine.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I run my own searx instance
As someone who's only recently heard of SearXNG, why searx and not SearXNG?
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Self-hosted Searxng. It's shared to multiple people which kills a lot of the usefulness in Google or others trying to track my instance.
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Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.
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I use mostly either ddg or brave search. I miss the google of pre 2010, when the majority of its results were good.
I also use Yandex whenever I'm looking for pirate stuff, the only engine that doesn't block those kinds of results.
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Currently down for updates, but does a great job of avoiding SEO abuse/blog spam/etc. Takes you back to the earlier days of the internet when it felt like there were more forums/individual sites/etc. They’re still out there, just hidden under all the junk.
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DuckDuckGo, but mostly because of the !bangs. I do 90% of my searches through StartPage (!s), and the rest directly on a few websites (Wikipedia, YouTube, Arch wiki...).
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I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for the past couple of years. I occasionally fall back to Google.
I was in this camp but find that the results I've gotten from DDG have been notably worse for the last year or so, to the point that I don't expect useful results to come out of it any more at this point. Even if I searched "site name" because I couldn't remember the URL was spelled "site-name.com" I've had no results coming from DDG, while Google had it as the first hit.
Have you experienced something similar? Are there techniques or workarounds I'm not aware of?
Sadly, yes, and instances like this have me falling back to Google. I'd happily try something else, but I'm a bit at a loss right now. What would you suggest as another search engine to try?
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I'm still looking for a search engine that doesn't use data from my IP address to provide targeted results. In the meantime, I've gone back and forth between using SearXNG instances and using Startpage, but there's really not a decent search engine in existence, from what I can tell.
Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use. Switched away from Google for privacy reasons and haven't missed it a bit.
@SemioticStandard Kagi. I used DDG for a long time, and Kagi is strictly better. Specifically, it’s very snappy and I trust the privacy guarantees even more since I’m a paying customer.
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I've ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down) without looking for Reddit results all the time.
Just simple searches like "Best gaming headphones" or "Realtek Driver Download" and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you'd like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit or archive.org versions), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called "Lens", which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I've defined - see image.
Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
(copied from another thread I replied to)
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Are you using DDG in addition to Kagi because of Kagi's limited number of searches per month, or because DDG does something better?
I'm a bit conflicted about Kagi because $5/month is a plausible price, but the limited number of searches seems like it would add an extra step of, "Do I want to use my limited search resource on this search?" to every search, which is an unwanted extra bit of friction.
I use DDG because I'm still not decided on whether or not Kagi is worth it. If there's no significant difference in the results returned by DDG, why pay for Kagi?
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I've been using DuckDuckGo since, at least 2010, maybe earlier. If its results aren't up to snuff, I'm not aware of that because they're what I'm used to. I fall through to Google ( !g) if I think there might be more out there. The bang commands are so good. I use DDG as my main search in my search bar and then I can use the bang commands to get to whatever specialized search I want from there. It's a meta-search-engine.
DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn't cutting it.
I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search
duck duck go on firefox.
i use brave search (even if i'm on firefox), it gives good results while having an independent index
I've been using Ecosia for a while and liking it. I think the results are usually better than Google and the image search is way more useful, still gives you direct links to the image files. Though most importantly I like planting trees.
Google, duck duck go when I don't want to see ads for days based on what I'm searching, Bing and Perplexity when I want to avoid doing a series of searches to learn something.
I use DuckDuckGo. Including using their browser on iOS and windows.
I exclusively use AltaVista.
DuckDuckGo for general searches
Google for image searches
Google maps for local businesses (including their website)
BingGPT for simple research answers (e.g. What door closers will fit on a Norton 1600 bolt pattern?)
Thanks for making me aware of Kagi, I've been trialing it and getting decent results is a breath of fresh air in a world of blogspam and LLM garbage.
Kagi on iOS and Mac. DDG w/Google on Android because my preferred Android browser, Vivaldi, doesn't offer Kagi. Anyone know how to default Vivaldi to Kagi?
Duck Duck Go too
DuckDuckGo for me personally.
DDG for everyday usage. Sometimes I try searching the same things on google just to compare results. I've tried searxng instances on and off in the past but its rarely been reliable for me and self hosting isn't really an option for me.
Google. As much as I'd like to use other search engines, their search results are all severely lacking and not adequate for my needs (often pertaining to research) and they're generally not as great on the multilingual front or in searching pdfs.
I also have some keywords set up in my browser so I can directly search sites I use (e.g. Wikipedia).
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