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Here are some options I use in my rotation.
Brave Search (skip the browser)
Mojeek
Qwant (French)
Yandex (Russian)
Mullvad Leta (Mullvad VPN subscription required)
MetaGer (German meta search)
Startpage (Private Google results)
DuckDuckGo (Private Bing results)
SearXNG and similar self hosted options are awesome, but I’ve found them unreliable.
Be skeptical of Kagi… It’s promoted pretty heavily around here for something that’s not FOSS.
I'm convinced at this point that Kagi is astroturfing on Lemmy, it's unnatural. All they do is just cite the marketing page when questioned about the quality, or as to why they supposedly think it's worth paying for compared to much more mature as-driven services that do respect your privacy.
Even though there's a small monthly cost, the results have been consistent for Kagi. But consistency meets only half of my needs for search: I also want to make decisions quickly from what I find within the contents. If I were to to go to a link, wait for it to load, scroll the content, etc. -- does that listed forum post have the answer I am looking for? Does this news article cover the nuances I have been tracking and would like to read more of? Kagi offers an AI-based summarize feature that helps. And that's been meeting the other half of my needs, as well.
EDIT, an opinion: Search services may well be eventually replaced by small, niche LLMs trained to perform summerization tasks, such as Consensus, which I have used for work research, and Perplexity.ai. The AI summarize feature of Kagi is why I see the service as more useful than straight indexes, even when self-hosted. Kagi is a stepping stone toward this for me, and why I recommend it.
Lol kagi bots spotted!
A 7 months old random fediverse account is a bot? You know that the entirety of the fediverse is like 0.001 percent of the user base of the social media giants?
That would be money really badly spent on astro-turfing bots.
Many people keep asserting that DuckDuckGo is as useless as Google, but I haven’t had a single issue with it. Could it be a regional thing?
DDG is ok for most searches, but they have definitely hit a plateau. Programming search results are quite poor, for instance.
I’ve started paying for kagi. Their results are just way better at this point.
Ddg cannot filter out results. If you don't want pages containing the term, term you add -term to your search and those results should not be included.
Ddg doesn't do this. I did a brief test of many search engines, and only google and mojeek filtered results correctly.
Edit: yadex seems to have working filtering.
I don't live in the US and the regional results for my country are worse on DuckDuckGo than on Google.
But still, I noticed Google's quality drastically falling down in recent years.
Brave Search works really well for me, and they have AI responses at the top of the page now that are really good.
Not sure why you got downvoted like crazy, but Brave legitimately has a great search engine. It also uses its own crawlers unlike DDG, Startpage or Kagi who are really just meta search engines piggybacking off other companies’ results.
Technically the best one was Altavista.
But they are long gone because they came from the old academic & idealistic internet and they never learned to survive in that internet where money rules.
From a very old memory, Google blew AltaVista out of the water no?
I mean we all switched for a reason and it wasn’t the cute logo.
Altavista was ahead of their time. The modern internet desperately needs a technical search engine.