Is there any good, free search engine left? - eviltoast

Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing now all return the same shitty LLM-generated nonsense sites to most of my searches, and don’t respect my literal search terms even when I put them in quotes.

I’m not ready to pay for search, yet.

Is there any alternative?

  • ᗪᗩᗰᑎ@lemmy.ml
    341·
    1 month ago

    Posted this previously:

    yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:

    • ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
    • duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
    • any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
    • marginalia.nu - specifically ‘random’ - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
      • anothermember@lemmy.zip
        1·
        1 month ago

        Are you (or is anyone here) daily-driving Stract yet? I discovered it a few months ago and thought it was everything I was looking for in a search engine, but also concluded that its search results aren’t up to the standard I can use for now, so I filed it as one to look out for. Would be interested in hearing others’ experiences.

        • Chris@feddit.ukEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          Unfortunately not. I’d like to, but as you say it’s not quite there yet. I probably should try it more frequently.

    • Dave@lemmy.nz
      10·
      1 month ago

      I think Searx is a good suggestion. Can be a bit slow to return results because it runs the search on a bunch of search engines and compiles the results, but that helps to make sure better stuff rises to the top.

      • logging_strict@lemmy.ml
        61·
        1 month ago

        The other suggestions aren’t suggestions at all. They are obsoleted by searx.space

        DDG … obsolete

        startpage.com … obsolete

        Browsers have default search engines. Curse everytime, DDG is accidentally queried.

        DDG is a curse word!

        Any centralized site, with privacy claims, is treated as lying thru their teeth. Front run future news.