Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn’t a clear solution to navigating the web because it’s either ai slop or the results are poor.
And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you’re looking for.
And so I told them I’d compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.
So far I have:
Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.
Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik
Ecosia: works great but relies on bing
I have tried things like qwant ect but haven’t really settled on those.
Any other suggestions?
I’d tell em to use udm14 but it’s still google so I’d rather keep that as a plan B.
Normally I find what I search for
I use duckduckgo for every of my web searching needs. 85% of the times I get relevant or somewhat relevant results. The rest… well, I acknowledge that I may search for super nieche things and move on.
Only thing I don’t kinda like in duckduckgo though is that the result list may change if I navigate to somewhere and go back, but I can live with it.
Mostly DDG when I can. It’s terrible with Slovene searches, so I occasionally still have to use google.
Also, our local najdi.si is just stupid.
Brave search (and Mojeek,Yandex,Mwmbl through SearXNG) for most stuff and Start page as a final resort.
Running all my queries through SearXNG in normal windows and DuckDuckGo in private ones.
Qwant off of Orion on iOS. Don’t bother with Kagi. There are better options if they switch to graphene.
EDIT: SearXNG is perfect in every way except for consistently returning useful search results.
Ultimately duckduckgo is the best.
Bing and Google are out for obvious reasons. Startpage kept asking me to prove I’m human. Qwant blocked me whenever I enabled a VPN with an exit in a region they couldn’t run ads to. Ecosia is a non-profit so I’d feel bad blocking ads, but I don’t want to see ads. Mojeek returned garbage results. Kagi is ridiculously overpriced and restrictive. Brave Search often didn’t return the results I was looking for. And SearXNG I don’t remember what the problem was.
I often add the word “forum” to my searches to help get some actual human discussion instead of ad farming AI slop articles. Seems like the only way to figure things out these days.
DuckDuckGo is said to cooperate with Google. Brave Search doesn’t give me confidence because the browser has had many privacy violation scandals in its code. StartPage is proprietary, but has good privacy laws, since its origin is from the Netherlands, although the service has been down very frequently lately. I think the best is without a doubt SearX my dear friend. Link: https://metasearx.com/info/en/about
I’m a software engineer so I search quite a lot.
99% of my search is on duckduckgo and it provides me the best answers. Even if I’m using someone else’s device to show them something for example, and their default search engine is google, I will switch to ddg because it genuinely provides better answers.
Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.
Well, at risk of downvotes…
I know what your asking but tbh I generally don’t search, at least not like we used to. It’s weird to say that, like I’m making some claim to heightened purity or some bullshit but it’s not that at all. Search is just … noisy AF these days.
I actually find myself using fewer sources, more directly and own my terms.
Eg: For something like PubMed, I go to pubmed (or define a proper boolean PICO search in an indexing tool). Sci-hub is a good source too.
Or I can hit the wikipedia API (or even better, self hosted kiwix) and find what I need.
Or, for known, commonly visited sites (like fan wikis), I use self-written tools.
There are plenty of sites have public facing, nicely formatted, JSON friendly results. Others are just clean to scrape. A recent discovery was Muvitimes (for getting movie times listings).
These tools query my white listed sites to a particular depth, collect the results I need, and present them for review.
You can then cache the info locally to query against using something like Meilisearch.
https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch
There are other options too. Something like Scrapy can collect structured data and a Trafilatura-like extractor can remove menus, adverts, and repeated page content.
https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy
I’ve even use something like self hosted Perplexica. It can query SearXNG, Tavily, Exa or other sources.
https://github.com/kiranz/perplexica
Honestly, if it’s a quick throw away search, I’ll call my self hosted llm, get it to pull from Tavilly and give me the summary and citations. That’s been miles better than most other options for me but YMMV.
Finally, if you’re talking about random occasional searches on phone, when I can’t access my LAN, I don’t mind DDG-lite
google for porn. brave-search for everything else
Kagi.
I use Brave Search all the time and like it a lot.
