Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn’t a clear solution to navigating the web because it’s either ai slop or the results are poor.
And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you’re looking for.
And so I told them I’d compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.
So far I have:
Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.
Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik
Ecosia: works great but relies on bing
I have tried things like qwant ect but haven’t really settled on those.
Any other suggestions?
I’d tell em to use udm14 but it’s still google so I’d rather keep that as a plan B.
Ultimately duckduckgo is the best.
Bing and Google are out for obvious reasons. Startpage kept asking me to prove I’m human. Qwant blocked me whenever I enabled a VPN with an exit node in a region they couldn’t run ads to. Ecosia is a non-profit so I’d feel bad blocking ads, but I don’t want to see ads. Mojeek returned garbage results. Kagi is ridiculously overpriced and restrictive. Brave Search often didn’t return the results I was looking for. And SearXNG I don’t remember what the problem was.
I often add the word “forum” to my searches to help get some actual human discussion instead of ad farming AI slop articles. Seems like the only way to figure things out these days.
Brave search works best for me. Even use Leo for ai results.
I used DuckDuckGo in the past, it’s pretty nice but it’s proprietary and the company is a little bit too much pro-AI. They made a poll about AI approval and despite the majority of people were against, they kept it on their regular website and launched DDG No-AI instead.
Now I’ve moved to SearchXNG (https://searx.ononoki.org/), and it’s very good but the Bing search engine has a weird bug where doesn’t give relevant results. You can fix this by using DuckDuckGo and Brave engines instead.
DuckDuckGo is said to cooperate with Google. Brave Search doesn’t give me confidence because the browser has had many privacy violation scandals in its code. StartPage is proprietary, but has good privacy laws, since its origin is from the Netherlands, although the service has been down very frequently lately. I think the best is without a doubt SearX my dear friend. Link: https://metasearx.com/info/en/about
I’m a software engineer so I search quite a lot.
99% of my search is on duckduckgo and it provides me the best answers. Even if I’m using someone else’s device to show them something for example, and their default search engine is google, I will switch to ddg because it genuinely provides better answers.
Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.
Is your instance public? Wouldn’t it need to be to anonymize or privatize your usage?
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.
Or I can hit the wikipedia API (or even better, self hosted kiwix) and find what I need.
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).
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://noai.duckduckgo.com/ is a decent way of avoiding some ai generated junk.
They should have turn it into the default and remove AI or make it opt-in.
google for porn. brave-search for everything else
Kagi.
I hate that it sounds the same as Italian “caghi” meaning “you shit”
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
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 love how it allows me to move domains up or down. This allows me to have wikipedia results at the very top and have all X, FB, MS domains blocked from appearing in the results.
TIL thanks
I pay for Kagi. The results are good oob and you can downrank/ban websites.
Same here. It’s great easily being able to block those shitty github/stackoverflow scrapers like codegrepper, answeroverflow etc.
and you can downrank/ban websites.
Holy shit, I’ve been wanting that for years. I’ll have to check them out.
Edit: Aaaand they have a built in AI despite calling themselves “human-focussed”. That’s a turnoff. If I’m paying for a search engine, I’d prefer to have a subscription option with the AI stripped out so I’m not subsidizing it for others.
Plus, I’m thinking about it I’m not exactly on board with needing an account with a search engine. That makes it super easy to track you. Meanwhile, using noai.duckduckgo anonymously via a VPN is way more private
I’m not exactly on board with needing an account with a search engine. That makes it super easy to track you.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
they have a built in AI despite calling themselves “human-focussed”
Because it’s a tool that can serve humans. Not strictly search-related, but their AI-based translation tool is genuinely great and very useful to me.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html
You don’t have to use built-in AI, it only triggers when you explicitly ask for it and you can completely disable it in the settings.
They also have anti-slop filters, BTW: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
Finally, not sure what models the search summarizer and the translation tool use, but the assistant lets you use open weights model like Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek et al.
You don’t have to use built-in AI
I don’t care. It’s bundled in with even the basic plan, which means you’re paying for it, even if you don’t use it. And no, it’s not magically better to use open models.
I don’t get how this concept is so hard to understand.
- No need to be combative.
- It is better to use open models.
1: I clearly established a boundary and you insisted on pushing it. Learn to take a fucking hint.
2: You know what’s even better? Not using AI at all.
In my experience, Kagi doesn’t force AI down your throat. It only triggers an AI summary if you end your query with a “?”, and it does seem to be summarization of the search results.
Also, as per Kagi’s pricing page, there is a higher tier for people who want more AI features as you are suggesting.
All that being said, I use a Searxng instance 😅
I don’t even want the fucking AI summaries. I don’t get how that’s so hard to understand.
The fact the AI is in even the basic plan means you’re paying for it, regardless of whether you use it. I don’t want AI, and I especially don’t want to give money to one.
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.
