I’m kind of tired of Google sending me to the same 3 sites whenever I search for something. If not the same 3 sites it’s 7 others that are so generic and boring I just feel they’re useless. It’s always makeuseof, androidauthority, or whatever other sites that have useful information but I rarely feel like they are saying anything new.
I want to see the results from those small blogs that are sometimes linked here. I can’t come up with one since… you know that’s why I’m asking how to find them, but you know them; they talk about nerdy stuff and are not afraid to get technical in whatever topic they discuss.
Also duckduckgo and qwant do the same thing. If there is a way to curate the results to better fit my needs then that’d be great too!
Kagi is working for me as well. Took my Google history, calculated I’d need the top tier with my number of searches and grinded my teeth, thinking “okay, I’ll see for a month”. Yeah, it works just so well, so 25€ it is.
I did their one time trial and then moved to the lowest paid tier for a month. Other than not getting ads it didn’t feel much more effective than some selective search-fu with duckduckgo. Any hints or tips on making it more effective? I can see the value proposition, but couldn’t justify it with the actual results I was getting.
been using kagi for some weeks and so far I am satisfied. It has a subscription cost after 300 searches though. But I guess getting rid of advertisements and tracking has a price
I save way more than I pay for Kagi because it doesn’t give me sponsored results and other garbage trying to make me waste money.
Yes, I tried that and have now got to the susbscribe or move on phase.
Went back to DDG and results really are not in the same league as Kagi so I may just cough up.
Yeah, I’ve read around their documentation and they have a pretty compelling reason why one should prefer search engines where you directly pay to the search provider instead of relying on third parties such as advertisers to pay for your search usage.
In the end, a subscription service ensures your incentives align, even if you need to pay for it.
Usually. Other times you end up with Netflix.
The search results are good but the limited searches make me anxious for running out. If it grows enough to the point where they can sustain themselves by offering the unlimited tier for $3-5 I might switch but not with the current pricing.
That actually looks really amazing! I really want more services to actually compel users to pay to support them, and make it a good decision to do so. I think this is the best suggestion so far. Thanks mate!
It’s been worth it for my spouse and me. Happy to pay for a product rather than being the product.
I’m running searxng on docker locally, and set that as my search engine on Firefox. It’s been awesome! I will probably start a blog and post instructions… Adding the custom search engine into about:config was kinda difficult. Other web browsers should be easier… (e.g. Vivaldi)
You can add search engines to Firefox in the address and search bar.
Go to the site you want to add, click the address bar for the drop down to show, then there will be an icon for that site with a green plus to add it.
If you use the search box it’s even easier. If you’re on the site the icon on the left will have the green plus symbol for it.
Kagi is really good
You need to pay for it but the free search allowance is enough for me.
By free search allowance, do you mean the one time trial of 100, the 300 per month if you’re paying $5, or something else?
I hit the threshold in a week, but it was because I got engaging results.
Ideal search engine for falling into unexpected rabbit holes. It’s scratches the itch of really exploring the web.
Kagi is the only one that consistently gives me much better results than google. The fact that it’s not riddled with ads on the first page was a big incentive for me to give them some cash. It actually improved my productivity at work a whole lot. This actually made me think how shitty google has become when I was preferring results given by an error prone AI compared to just searching for it. Now with Kagi, I can actually find the stuff I’m looking for and only use AI in case I can’t find it there for some reason. Totally worth the monthly subscription for me.
Marginalia Search perhabs.
Also these are worth mentioning:
- Mojeek have their own index. The results are occasionally a bit of a mess, but they are very open to input and have an account on Mastodon.
- Infotiger have their own index and the results are good.
- Alexandria which use the Common Crawl index.
I love duck duck go but theres one key thing I’ve been missing (or don’t know how to do) with google you can just throw -word or -“a phrase” and it will ommit any result with them
You have to blacklist the AI farm sites though
How do you that? They’ve been getting on my last nerve.
Firefox has uBlacklist, might be on Chrome too.
Thanks for the recommendation. Looks like it only works with Google text search, and I don’t use Google search.
I use it with DuckDuckGo and startpage, it can be configured for a few search engines.
Oh wow! Ok! I’ll see if it works for me, too. Thanks!
Have you tried https://duckduckgo.com/ . I’ve used them a very long time. I do not use Google search.
DDG just uses Google’s search engine, minus all the trackers.
Where did you hear this? This isn’t true. If you want google without the tracking, use StartPage (if you’re using DDG this can be accessed with the !sp bang preface)
DDG uses Bing as their fallback engine but also does a lot of propitiatory indexing of its own
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
There was a time before google’s search engine, when all the previous attempts had not managed to become the dominant entry point for the web. During that time, we would find interesting web pages through people and/or specific interests. Then, google came, and for a time it was good (read like The Second Renaissance Part I story from animatrix). Ads and SEO were not everywhere yet, content mattered more than those two. So, while I came here to suggest what @bbbhltz@beehaw.org commented, when I read your post text I thought that maybe, at least for what we tend to constantly look for news, articles and discussions, we shouldn’t constantly rely on search engines. For example, most technologies have news letters, weekly/monthly magazines, mailing lists, community boards or other forms of group communication through which you can gradually discover better content sources (individuals or groups) on what interests you. Without the search engine service and its cost (direct or indirect) between you and the content.
I use www.startpage.com It’s Google without the trackers. Probably not really what you’re looking for but is does the job really well.
