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
4get https://git.lolcat.ca/lolcat/4get https://4get.ca/instances
lots of public instances which tend to be very stable + it’s extremely easy to self host. in my experience it’s significantly better than every other proxy search engine
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.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.
SearxNG has been bad lately, so just put priority words first to get around it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I switched to using Ecosia a while back, and have had no problems with it. The results are generally relevant enough for everyday use, and it feels good knowing that my searches contribute (at least in some small way) to reforestation projects.
It’s not perfect, of course… It still relies partly on bing’s index, but the experience has been stable and consistent for me. I also like that the interface is clean and privacy-focused without trying to upsell the search experience.
In the past I’ve tried alternatives like StartPage and DuckDuckGo, but Ecosia has quietly become my default. It just works well enough without much fuss, and that’s something I really appreciate right now.
Rooting for ecosia with it plans to create their own index, but unhappy with the direction they’re gping specially with AI
I feel the same way. I’d love to see them move toward developing their own independent index. I also really hope they stay true to what makes them different and don’t get caught up in the whole “AI-everything” trend. Search doesn’t need to be artificially padded or reworded by a chatbot, it just needs to be genuinely useful, transparent, and connected to reality. If Ecosia focused entirely on building a clean, human-centered search experience powered by their own index, without the AI noise, I think that would be far more valuable than following the same path other major engines have taken…
For Lemmy, I guess 22 comments counts as a mega thread.
You gotta see what’s happening in Hexbear
i am using DuckDuckGo ? am i doing something wrong lol
most things i personally search for i have to append reddit anyway, since otherwise it feels like ai generated content anyway
searxng :)
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
How are you doing this? I can’t get it to work. ^https://www.youtube.com/|https://www.invidious.io/ doesnt work for me and I can’t find what to put in for redlib
invidious.io isn’t actually an instance of invidious. If you replace your rule with “^https://www.youtube.com/|https://inv.nadeko.net/” (or any other instance: https://docs.invidious.io/instances/), then it should work. For Redlib, I replace www.reddit.com with reddit.nerdvpn.de (although reddit often blocks redlib instances from being able to access their content).
An easy way to see if services can be redirected like this is to open a link (such as a video on youtube.com) in your browser and replace it with another domain. If it pulls up the correct content on the new domain, then such a rule can work.
I selfhost searxng. It’s good enough even if it’s just a meta-search (but at least removes AI generated answers).
I’ve looked at yacy (https://yacy.net/) some time ago. Nice concept but I had technical limitations at my side to properly peer with others. Maybe I’ll try again as I resolved them.
How’s the resource usage of SearX?
Just checked, 138mb. It’s a podman container.
I grew tired of all of them and I’m using mullvad leta. Too bad they don’t support images but it’s the only one without ai. It’s not perfect and it crashes if you use “site:” but so far it’s working for me better than the others.
Interesting, I’d never even heard of that one!
Just going to give Wiby a shoutout because no-one else has. More for curiosity / surfing than research, but you definitely get unique results.
Just try Kagi and you’ll never look back.
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😇
I forgot to include in the post that I’m too broke for Kagi, otherwise I’d have tried it already :(
Use Brave search, It has a great UI and has good search indexing
Aren’t the just soin shitcoin propaganda scheme or something. People complain a lot about Brave.
Yep, probably better than google at this stage.
I’ve tried all alternatives to google and I like Qwant the most so far
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.
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.
I did end up switching from searxng to 4get on my server yesterday as I previously stated I would. It’s much better. way faster.
if you want you can try it out on my instance https://4get.andmc.ca/
Do you know what happened to Searx? Did the big engines create algos to throw it off?
