Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.

Well, at risk of downvotes...

I know what your asking but tbh I generally don't search, at least not like we used to. It's weird to say that, like I'm making some claim to heightened purity or some bullshit but it's not that at all. Search is just ... noisy AF these days.

I actually find myself using fewer sources, more directly and own my terms.

Eg: For something like PubMed, I go to pubmed (or define a proper boolean PICO search in an indexing tool). Sci-hub is a good source too.

https://sci-hub.st/

Or I can hit the wikipedia API (or even better, self hosted kiwix) and find what I need.

https://kiwix.org/en/

Or, for known, commonly visited sites (like fan wikis), I use self-written tools.

There are plenty of sites have public facing, nicely formatted, JSON friendly results. Others are just clean to scrape. A recent discovery was Muvitimes (for getting movie times listings).

https://muvitimes.com/

These tools query my white listed sites to a particular depth, collect the results I need, and present them for review.

You can then cache the info locally to query against using something like Meilisearch.

https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch

There are other options too. Something like Scrapy can collect structured data and a Trafilatura-like extractor can remove menus, adverts, and repeated page content.

https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy

I've even use something like self hosted Perplexica. It can query SearXNG, Tavily, Exa or other sources.

https://github.com/kiranz/perplexica

Honestly, if it's a quick throw away search, I'll call my self hosted llm, get it to pull from Tavilly and give me the summary and citations. That's been miles better than most other options for me but YMMV.

Finally, if you're talking about random occasional searches on phone, when I can't access my LAN, I don't mind DDG-lite

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

google for porn. brave-search for everything else

Kagi.

I use Kagi for personal devices. I wish there was an open source alternative, but there's not. So I'm stuck.

For work or other devices, I use Qwant.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ is a decent way of avoiding some ai generated junk.

DDG is my goto, I always have a SearXNG instance, but it's relatively slow and runs into problems too frequently to be my goto

qwant for basically everything, tineye for reverse image search and google for that 1 out of 100 searches that i cant get an adequate qwant search of

I use marginalia search and wiby to find "small web" content. Good for finding more human created resources deeply buried in most search indexes.

Kagi. Not cheap but I seriously cant go back. Its really good for what I need - actual results at the top of the first page, based purely on what I searched for. What a concept. My needs are basic to be clear.

I pay for Kagi. The results are good oob and you can downrank/ban websites.

Yandex for reverse image search or piracy content

The noai DDG for everything else.

Unfortunately I have notice for the last couple of months that some simple things I can't just find the answer and the shit AI suggestion baked in the google search is giving me better results and I don't think that is the AI that got better.

I use Brave Search all the time and like it a lot.

I switched to noai.duckduckgo when startpage went ai. It is a lot better than when I tried duckduckgo in previous years, and definitely better than startpage was. I haven't noticed any issues with search returns.

Duckduckgo for everything.

At first, after the switch years ago, I'd occasionally fallback to Google to search for solutions or explanations of technical errors but I guess Duckduckgo got better and/or Google got worse and I no longer use any other.

A few days ago I tried Qwant briefly with the idea to try to change to non-US services, don't remember what for, and was not satisfied with the results. I did not try it for long enough to say it's not a good choice though.

I have been using Brave Search for a couple of years and have been very satisfied with the results. It uses its own index instead of relying on Bing or Google like most search engines. The summaries are also one of the few cases that I have found AI to be useful for some more obscure questions.

The image results are very poor though, so I still use DuckDuckGo for that.

noai duckduck go

Self hosting searxng: https://docs.searxng.org/ I use it for everything. It finds results from multiple search engines, and lists every engine name at the bottom of each link to see where this "recommendation" comes from. You can configure which "engines" it should search. So I use it as my default for everything. The results aren't always the best and there are times when I then open other search engines directly to see if its any better. But admitteley it is only hosted on my main PC. Currently I cannot access it from other computers, but that is something I plan todo in the future.

If you use Archlinux, then its quite easy as there is a package that always builds from source. Look at my instructions here: https://lemmy.ml/post/45955322

If self hosting isn't your thing, then you can just use an instance from someone else who made it available in the public: https://searx.space/ It's also a good way to see how it works before committing to self hosting, if you plan to.

I use qwant mostly

Kagi. Once you try it you'll never go back.

Ecosia

Works very well for everyday stuff, been using it for almost 2 years now, though it does take a bit to get used to it because it gives you slightly different results for the same search queries

It's not worse, it just interprets your queries slightly differently

The only time it consistently fails and I switch to google is when I need to look up something via popular references, typically text on memes, for which Ecosia instead tends to return serious/factual results instead of the funny I was looking for

I use Qwant as my daily mostly because it's European and I can turn of AI.

I was using Brave search for a couple of years for everything and sometimes i was switching to duckduckgo if i couldn’t find what i needed but this was rare. Now i self host SearXNG but this is not an option for an avg user. Brave search is an independent engine and privacy focused.

I selfhost searxng ¯\(ツ)/¯

Someone posted this neosearch thing recently that I've enjoyed :

https://neosearch.org/

I still use udm14. I've got most of the searches listed installed in my firefox and I jump between them a lot.

Selfhosted SearXNG or ddg noai / startpage when i get rate limited

DDG for everything but especially searches in other countries (using the country toggle).

Google for images and super localized results.

Yandex for reverse image search (yes really).

I use duckduckgo because I'm basic.

I'm not a tech person. I use duck duck go or i use Google through ten blue links to remove the AI results.