Programming

Not perfect:
But here are some ideas.

• reddit (tor)
• wikipedia (tor)
• certain niche direct sources (tor)

More ideal ideas:

• certain specific private source (maybe tor). Not reliable but high quality.
• large collection of raw links ( requires labor, skill. And yields imperfect results )
• searx ( mainly to share with friends and as a fallback. it is a pretty great premade metasearch engine when selfhosted)
• ready-to-go foss searchengine implementations. (Limited in scope, requires decent amount of "labor" and time. Requires setup phase and light maintaining. Extremely high quality results. Optionally invest money in various ways to supercharge. Perhaps recruit collaborators)

other stuff:

• creating private collections and bookmarks
• not using internet or using rarely or using in cautious way. Or not using www.
• focusing on distracting self with hands-on projects.

What am i actually using at this point? (Nothing is set up currently!).

• Sometimes i use tor 70% of the time. Sometimes i use tor 30% of the time.
• very frequently non www .
• duckduckgo when needed. [Often] without visiting the links
• niche sources (2, ..)
• reddit

*this isnt perfect! but i think overall i think i dont spend much time traveling to websites for info.

Historically:

• searx
• searchengine
• dabble in scaling.

Future:

• selfhost
• scaling
• further isolation
• IRL
• other stuff. such as creating new solutions.

There is certainly room for immediate improvement here.
Im just lazy.

I dont need the internet as much as the internet needs me.

Shameless self promo: I was upset by this as well so I’m working now on a curated search engine just for anything related to webdev. It focuses on blogs and docs. No BS, just high quality sources.

https://kukei.eu

Also it’s hosted on a PC in my living room ;)

Kagi. I haven't had a failed search results in months, and when I do google can't find it either so I haven't lost anything.

I'm avoiding the major search engines. If I really need a search engine, I use DuckDuckGo. Most of the time, search forms of a few websites provide better results. I've bookmarked search forms of e.g. wikipedia, Wiktionary, the python docs, Arch Linux wiki, github, dict.leo.org, bug trackers of software I commonly use (such as Mozilla's bug tracker) and so on. I'm basically using Firefox's "keyword" search feature in the way DuckDuckGo's !bang syntax works.

Qwant

Presearch, Perplexity, and occasionally DDG.

I'm using Kagi. I find that it does a better job at finding "legitimate" sites rather than blogspam and content marketing. However I'm not sure I will stick with it a long time. I seems like it has mostly stalled and the team is getting distracted by making a browser, non-relevant AI (I have no problem with the few AI experiments tied to searching) and other side projects. We'll see. I really hope that they pull themselves together and focus or it might not last. But for now they seem like one of the better options available.

Bing's new "Deep Search" where it has some sort of LLM refinement iteration process has also been helpful sometimes. Probably the best AI search product I have seen, but definitely doesn't replace most searches for me.

I used DuckDuckGo a couple of years ago, but they added their own blacklist of sites (pretty stupid), and for my language it started returning crappy generated spam sites instead of relevant results. They shouted at the top of their lungs that for my language they simply index the results from Yandex, but this is a lie, they are different.

StartPage gave the best results, but they introduced a captcha that I got every damn request.

I'm currently using SearXNG, which collects results from Google. And these are damn normal results, unlike other search engines that consider themselves the smartest and edit the results.

A combination of SearXNG and Stract, for the most part. They're definitely not perfect (yet), but they mostly get the job done! And I think they both have a lot of cool filters and refinement settings that I haven't even taking advantage of so far.

For niche stuff it seems like a lot of hyper targeted search engines are popping up, like Sepia Search for PeerTube.

If you mean for programming specifically, I... don't, really. At most it would be for a quick sanity check on syntax in a language I don't write often, for which Google is fine. But otherwise I rely on documentation and search features of the various language/tool-specific websites.

Ecosia. These days it's better than Google.

Brave

I used to use Duck Duck Go, but it's supposedly not as private as it claims to be, and my understanding is Brave is a bit better there.

I don't use the Brave browser tho, just the search engine

Kagi.

I know, I know... I just really like it.

Since you mentioned not knowing if this is the right community. For any question where you dont know where it goes [email protected] usually catches everything. Theres also some other question coms at [email protected] and [email protected] but theyre more specific. I can leave this one here though, its fine (especially since theres a bunch of info here now)