I’m trying to degoogle. I’ve heard good things about DuckDuckGo and I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and it’s pretty solid. But I’m just wondering what the Lemmy/Piefed community prefer for a search engine.
You must log in or # to comment.
DuckDuckGo: good all-around search engine
Searx: when I’m feeling extra FOSS
Kagi: when I need Google from 10-15 years ago. Has a cool “lenses” feature that let’s you target the type of sites the results come from. (Kagi is one of those rare moments where I use something proprietary because the more open alternatives can’t meet my needs yet.
Quick! Look it up on AltaVista!
Went from DDG to start page. I’d use kagi if they weren’t frugal with searches.
Kagi for well over a year now
I’ve been using the HTML only version of DuckDuckGo as my default since Google made JS mandatory to run searches. It works ok for most of the simple queries I make. (e.g. looking something up from the Python docs, MDN, etc.) I resort to Google still for the stuff it completely flubs.
Gone from probably 99% Google + 1% of other to maybe something like 95% DDG + 5% other (mostly Google).
As much as I hate Microslop, I’ve been primarily using Bing because of the whole rewards thing they have. Although, I obviously wouldn’t recommend using it and instead would recommend DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or OceanHero.
For those who haven’t heard of OceanHero, their goal is somewhat similar to Ecosia but they work towards cleaning the Ocean.
duck duck go is like firefox for me. I use it currently but im sorta moving away from it. I don’t really have a good ddg replacement though.
4get, I self host an instance
Startpage (which is a proxy for bing, but… Yeah)
Not a traditional one, but https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/tvZQHU4Dbf. And if it doesn’t show the results I want, I use Ecosia.
DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes
Quite a lot of the time. It’s pretty damn awful, actually.
NoAI DuckDuckGo (noai.duckduckgo.com)
it has decent enough results and disables the unwanted AI features (I don’t want to prompt an LLM whenever I search something)
I am willing to switch to something else, right now DDG is good enough.
I think I have it set to only prompt when I click the button, which is the same domain, and still leaves the option
TIL about that option, thanks.
I use DDG as well. Have for years now, it’s actually gotten to the point where it gives similar if not better results than Google Search for me now.
Qwant/Ecosia.
Used to use Kagi (paid search engine, if you don’t know it) which was truly remarkable and well worth its cost, at least in my eyes. But, as a EU citizen, last year US shit show, made me realize I’d better rely less on US-based tech. So…
Agreed. If anyone knows about an EU (or allies) search engine with a business model that’s not strictly based on advertising (topped up by grants perhaps), let us know.
I use Ecosia/Qwant for now.
Yeah I’m with Qwant for the moment.
I used to use Kagi.
I used to use DDG before that.
I don’t really have any complaints about any of these.
I’m trying to get better at using bangs to search on the sites I’m specifically looking for.
Just curious, what made you change from Kagi?
The CEO said some stuff.
IIRC a blogger said something unfavourable and he went thermo nuclear. Not that big a deal.
At the time though it seemed like the alternatives were just as good.
deleted by creator
https://search.marginalia.nu/ is pretty awesome for getting human generated / small web content.
If I’m looking for people sharing my hyper-fixation https://aboutideasnow.com/ is excellent. https://searchmysite.net/ is a indieweb opti-in only tool with similar usecases but not much is there. Lemmy
https://www.mojeek.com/ I have as my default browser search to try to support as its the only real large index comparable to Google and Bing (DDG uses), but it falls short a lot.
DDG is my primary engine when I need something fast / the others don’t work.
If I can’t find it in the small web and regular search fails, I’ll sometimes try the udm14 Google trick https://udm14.com/
After that its posting to the askfedi hashtag (or ask here)
