I’m trying to degoogle. I’ve heard good things about DuckDuckGo and I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and it’s pretty solid. But I’m just wondering what the Lemmy/Piefed community prefer for a search engine.
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DuckDuckGo: good all-around search engine
Searx: when I’m feeling extra FOSS
Kagi: when I need Google from 10-15 years ago. Has a cool “lenses” feature that let’s you target the type of sites the results come from. (Kagi is one of those rare moments where I use something proprietary because the more open alternatives can’t meet my needs yet.
Kagi for well over a year now
Quick! Look it up on AltaVista!
Went from DDG to start page. I’d use kagi if they weren’t frugal with searches.
As much as I hate Microslop, I’ve been primarily using Bing because of the whole rewards thing they have. Although, I obviously wouldn’t recommend using it and instead would recommend DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or OceanHero.
For those who haven’t heard of OceanHero, their goal is somewhat similar to Ecosia but they work towards cleaning the Ocean.
NoAI DuckDuckGo (noai.duckduckgo.com)
it has decent enough results and disables the unwanted AI features (I don’t want to prompt an LLM whenever I search something)
I am willing to switch to something else, right now DDG is good enough.
I think I have it set to only prompt when I click the button, which is the same domain, and still leaves the option
TIL about that option, thanks.
Qwant/Ecosia.
Used to use Kagi (paid search engine, if you don’t know it) which was truly remarkable and well worth its cost, at least in my eyes. But, as a EU citizen, last year US shit show, made me realize I’d better rely less on US-based tech. So…
Agreed. If anyone knows about an EU (or allies) search engine with a business model that’s not strictly based on advertising (topped up by grants perhaps), let us know.
I use Ecosia/Qwant for now.
Yeah I’m with Qwant for the moment.
I used to use Kagi.
I used to use DDG before that.
I don’t really have any complaints about any of these.
I’m trying to get better at using bangs to search on the sites I’m specifically looking for.
Just curious, what made you change from Kagi?
The CEO said some stuff.
IIRC a blogger said something unfavourable and he went thermo nuclear. Not that big a deal.
At the time though it seemed like the alternatives were just as good.
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duck duck go is like firefox for me. I use it currently but im sorta moving away from it. I don’t really have a good ddg replacement though.
I’m using paid Kagi subscription, and it makes searching for stuff feel like it used to before Big Tech broke the internet. I can actually find what I’m looking for again.
The “SlopStop” feature is worth it alone, but I love how I can choose what types of results and sources to prioritize.
10/10 Highly recommended.
I’ve been using the HTML only version of DuckDuckGo as my default since Google made JS mandatory to run searches. It works ok for most of the simple queries I make. (e.g. looking something up from the Python docs, MDN, etc.) I resort to Google still for the stuff it completely flubs.
Gone from probably 99% Google + 1% of other to maybe something like 95% DDG + 5% other (mostly Google).
DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes
Quite a lot of the time. It’s pretty damn awful, actually.
Kagi. I know it gets trash talked for several reasons, but I’ve used ecosia, duckduckgo, tried searxng, and now I’m back to Kagi. I just like it better all around.
Been a Kagi user for about 6 months now. Not one negative thing to say. So refreshing to have good results again.
Kagi user since 2022, according to my account. I’ll admit that I rarely ever cross-check with other search engines. I like their assistants too (they are basically re-selling access to all big LLMs in their Ultimate tier). But you don’t really need those, what keeps me there are the good search results. (And the ability to easily block/raise whole domains on the results.)
It feels like spam to mention Kagi since it’s all over the place (even on Hacker News), but I’ve been a subscriber since the beginning and it made me a “2x programmer” due to their good results.
If I had no money left, I would try SearXNG.
I tired it. I’m not unintelligent, and it was far too complex of a setup for me. I did not care for it. But that’s just me.
For programming questions why not use an LLM? The days of searching a specific problem are long done. LLM+Documentation is all you really need now days.
I learn a lot while I search. LLMs may or may not hallucinate, and I’m not learning.
Depends how you use LLMs. I didn’t say use LLM to solve the problem, I have it breakdown the documentation and make it easier to read/provide examples of usage + explain the steps.
Stackoverflow also has incorrect answers always marked as correct and isn’t a great source to learn from, the best way to learn is just reading documentation and having breakpoints to read the data coming in.
I had to make a stackoverflow back in the day to correct so many incorrect answers.
I’ve used DDG for the past 7 years or so. When ever I don’t find what I’m looking for I just add !g to the search term and it Googles it for me.
4get, I self host an instance
Kagi. Every once in a while I tried out Qwant, but it’s just not there yet.
Can you describe why you think its better than Qwant or DDG? I tried it but didn’t felt that much difference to have an account for search engine.
being able to block/downrank/uprank domains from search results, being able to block AI from search results, rewriting URLs (for example, reddit.com to old.reddit.com), kagi translate, bangs (ddg has them but qwant does not)
I don’t know how those search engines evolved, but last time I checked (a few years ago), Qwant was the worst search engine ever, and DDG was pretty average. I don’t know how Kagi works, but it’s good for every query. I usually don’t recommend it because it’s expensive ($10 a month) but it really changed how I work, especially for programming topics.
As an example, Qwant still uses w3schools as the reference for C++, which is some “4chan trolling” level of stupidity.
