I’d like to start a thread for people to share what they’re using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.

I’m doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my “stack” has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.

My (shitty and getting worse) solution:

  • DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG’s relevance has been shit for its entire existence
  • StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
  • currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it’s not easy to set up if you don’t use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with

The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn’t return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.

BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.

I’d love to hear suggestions.

tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines

  • Special Wall@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I also use Kagi. It has the option for AI but doesn’t shove it down your throat like other providers.

    One feature I especially appreciate from Kagi are URL redirects. I can have it automatically replace parts of the URL from any search result. For example, I have YouTube results redirect to Invidious, and Reddit redirect to redlib, without me having to replace the domain myself

  • PiraHxCx@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I just want to say I disagree about the decline, I think there was a time there was huge decline indeed, first there were too much shitty autogenerated and bait content getting high in the index, then they shoved more and more sponsored results and early filter bias were shitty, but I believe it all improved greatly in later years, specially with AI search, Google indeed manages to give you most relevant stuff on top now, and most of times it will cover all you are asking, I find the difference from other engines noticeable, the problem is that Google is fucking cancer…
    I mostly use Starpage, sometimes results aren’t too good and I go to DuckDuckGo. I sometimes use Leta and Brave Search as well, but there are times I need to Google, especially for shopping.

  • Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    1 year ago

    Here is a list of alternative (meta-)search engines:
    Swisscow
    Qwant
    Ecosia
    DuckDuckGo
    SearXNG
    MetaGer
    Leta by Mullvad
    Mojeek
    Kagi (Paid I think)

    Das all I can remember rn.

      • Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        1 year ago

        Hwat exactly do you mean by SearXNG being bad? Cause in some sens that isn’t even a thing. It’s a meta search engine.

        • ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          0·
          1 year ago

          The results do not match the search. Often it’s a bunch of Chinese. I just switch to Swisscows. When SearXNG gets ironed out, I’ll probably switch back just because I like that it’s federated.

          • Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            0·
            1 year ago

            You fundamentally misunderstand the techbology you are using. SearXNG is not federated, it is a selfhostable meta search engine. If you have an instance that has a lot of chinese results, then that instance’s owner hss chosen chinese search engines. SearXNG can be considered to have the exact same results as other engines do. You can only receive Google results, Brave, what have you, but it being a meta search engine, you can also mix results. It can also search other indices than search engines for the modern web, such as wikis or published papers. SearXNG is “ironed out”. It’s feature complete.

            • ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              0·
              1 year ago

              I forgot that I might have switched instances. Thanks for the explanation. I might try to revert back to the one I was using and see if that helps.

  • NKBTN@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Just going to give Wiby a shoutout because no-one else has. More for curiosity / surfing than research, but you definitely get unique results.

  • rozodru@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I have my own SearXNG self hosted Instance but I’m probably going to switch it to 4get today. I’ve just noticed it getting worse and worse over time. slow, bad results, or just randomly starts 504ing when everything else (forgejo, vaultwarden, navidrome, jellyfin, Akkoma, etc) on my server continues to work fight.

    Tried some 4get instances and it’s just so damn snappy and quick.

    • oOAlteredBeastOo@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      I noticed the same bad search issue a few weeks ago. I tried several other instances from searx.space and they all gave bad results. I reverted to DDG. I’ll have to give 4get a shot.

    • ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      I forgot to include in the post that I’m too broke for Kagi, otherwise I’d have tried it already :(

    • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      1 year ago

      Last time I checked Kagi didn’t have an option for people who just do a few searches a month so it ended being too expensive for me.

      I might have to check again though😇

  • TMKI@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    I don’t think Qwant and Ecosia’s index has fully rolled out. They have been using it as a partial index in France and Germany starting in summer 2025 according to their FAQs on their website. So I guess it would depend where you live.