I’ve been using DuckDuck Go since leaving Google Search, but that seems to be the first step away. I’m not keen on their AI assist. I tried Start Page, but the first four results were ads. I don’t mind paying a small fee for good search. So Brave Search or Kagi?
What a nice thread!
I add here https://www.ecosia.org/
Try Mojeek. I don’t like, at all, that it’s based in the UK, but at least it’s not Gringoland. Easy-to-use, own web index, truly independent company with own ad syndication (no Bing).
SearXNG is good. If you’re not self-hosting, make sure to have a shortlist of alternative instances. I like instances that pull from google, but those also tend to suffer from rate-limiting.
What is your goto instance? I use https://searx.foss.family/
It’s a toss-up between opnxng.com, priv.au, and searx.tiekoetter.com for me since they all don’t have perfect uptimes. I have a bias for ones with shorter URLs and sometimes I wonder if other people do too.
ononoki , or any other free instance of searxng on the web.
I am a kagi user on the $5 plan and love it.
I tried Kagi because I was excited by the hype and would gladly pay a fee for superior search thats not google. But, my experience wasn’t great:
- Couldn’t reliably give me local results. E.g., searching for “pizza near me” would render results from a combination of my local city, Sydney and those in Singapore.
- UI needs some basic improvements. Rules of font spacing for starters.
- It was slow. like at least 500 ms for me to get a page of results, even though I was pretty sure it was using my closest AWS region.
I hope this doesn’t come off as too negative–I don’t want to be disparaging. Contrarily, I would love to hear your thoughts as a supporter of the platform. It could be that I was using it wrong, or theres some mitigating features that I missed. As I said, I would gladly pay to not be the product.
I’m glad for this thread because I use duck duck Go but I hate it. Become trash in the last year.
Searx has been excellent for me, but it’s not the best option if you want to search by date relevancy. I’ll find that I combine DDG and Searx mostly because of this.
Have you tried adding the no AI version of Duckduckgo to your browser search options? I believe it’s just adding “https://noai.duckduckgo.com/”.
It’s definitely been a QOL improvement for me.
Nice!!!
I did it a week ago and it’s been great not having that AI summary at the top. I don’t know if this also disregards AI for image searches as there seemed to be an additional fix for that.
If you don’t mind paying, Kagi’s the gold standard imo. Been using it for years. The pricing has been pretty garbo at times but they’ve settled on a good model now. Used it extensively for research back when I was a freelance writer and it’s stuck around as my general-use search engine. It’s great for research, functionally really well designed.
I use Kagi and honestly I really like it… I am a paid user though so yeah to get the most out of it you gotta pay
Which subscription tier do you use?
I also use Kagi. Just start with the trial, upgrade to the $5 starter tier when you run out, then upgrade to the pro $10 tier if you hit the limit. It appropriately apportions things if you’ve only used half your month.
I’m on the $10 pro tier as I use over the 300 searches a month in the $5 starter tier ($10 is unlimited).
Kagi has AI on request. If you put a question mark on the end of your search query, you get an AI response. No question mark, no AI.
I think Kagi is worth trying for other reasons, but probably only for people who $10 a month is not a significant cost. It’s not better than food, but it does let me block all Pinterest results so I never see them.
Maybe dumb question but I assume we would be giving up info if we use the question mark, correct?
I see you edited and so I thought I’d follow up with some thoughts.
It isn’t clear where AI queries are processed. They use to have an infobox saying what LLM model it was and that it ran on their systems, but that seems to be gone. They have also since released an AI assistant product that connects to many providers so I’m guessing your searches with question marks are proxied to other companies. Note also that for normal (non-ai) searches, Kagi uses google and other indexes to provide results, so your search is also going to them. But it’s proxied so google doesn’t know which is your search term and which is mine.
Virtually every major privacy focused search engine does this, as running a full search index is incredibly expensive, so outside of google and bing there aren’t many good ones that run their own index and never provide results from other search engines.
Also, is there anything bad about them, like affiliated with Google, satan, Facebook, or some other undesirable entities.
They are a start up, have no VC funding according to other lemmy people, and since you’re paying for the service (instead of advertising being their revenue) they are incentivised to make the best search instead of show you more ads.
Basically, we don’t know if they are evil but as far as we know they aren’t. Not owned by google, Facebook, etc but I don’t know if satan owns them.
Hell, I’m sold. I started paying for email, so I guess I will have to make a digital privacy budget.
Not sure what you mean. Are you meaning in terms of privacy or missing out on normal results or something else?
More the privacy issue.
Yeah I would say start with the smaller one and its very easy to upgrade/downgrade. For me I do the highest tier one because I work in tech and I want to use all the premium LLM stuff hah
I’m sticking with DDG, it’s not perfect but still better than Google
Maybe take a look at Qwant.com.
SearXNG or Kagi
SearXNG all day!!
If you don’t mind keeping a cookie around, DDG has search settings that let you turn off AI Assist and advertisements.
Absolutely Kagi. Its worth the small fee and has so KANU useful features that make combing through the bullshit way easier. We use it daily.
