Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn’t see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?
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Kagi
DuckDuckGo as a default with Google as fallback depending on what I’m looking for. For lemmy the default search of my instance works well enough so haven’t tried external engines.
Pro tip: if you add g! to your search results in DuckDuckGo, it returns Google results
Yeah that’s what I usually do
Same. I have had particularly poor results on image searches from duckduckgo. It’s on par or superior to Google for general web searches, but man, Google image search is still better
Does anyone care to explain the possible reason for downvoting this - is there something I am not aware of wrt DDG?
It’s based on Bing from what I recall, and it’s not necessarily the most accurate engine. I tried it for a few months and couldn’t replace Google with it unfortunately.
Thank you for explaining! And now I am getting downvoted for asking an honest question, so that I can learn more, sheesh. Ignoring the fact for the moment that the Fediverse is becoming more Reddi-fied all the time… I appreciate you actually taking the time to answer.
I actually swap back and forth between Google and DDG. For things like local business hours, Image search and Maps, the former finds the better results. For a few things (that it may consider piracy?), Google refuses to find results even on page 10. For most other things, while the SEOs may not have entirely taken over, they at least have risen to an extremely annoying prominence.
e.g. try searching for the word “inspire”, and rather than offer you the dictionary definition, the top hit (for me right now) is the “Inspire” sleep apnea innovation - which nowhere is labelled as an advertisement:-(. I understand that the latter company would like to subvert the normal rules of politeness & etiquette and replace my prioritization so that their name appears at the very tippy-top of the search (possibly locally, or perhaps even world-wide?), but that doesn’t mean that that is what *I* wanted. Which is why more & more often these days I go to DDG first and then Google, rather than the other way around which is what I did until very recently.
But yeah, sometimes I do legit use Google search too.
And now I am getting downvoted for asking an honest question
Welcome to programming.dev! 😂I’ve had the same happen (technical issue, looking for a solution or workaround, get downvoted). I take it as “I’m not interested in this - don’t ever show me anything about this again” - well, just scroll on by then, not hard. 🙄
‘Honest inquiries are not desired here’, or like ‘You should have researched it yourself first’ or some such. Also do not make the mistake of expressing a personal preference for anything other than using Arch Linux btw:-P.
I can’t even recall the last time I downvoted something. It’s measured in weeks rather than hours though. On the one hand: to each their own, but on the other, people are so short-sighted they don’t see how that acts to stifle conversations - like a personal preference is just that, personal, and for something like this OP, a disagreement expressed via text comment can explain something, and we all (people receiving & offering it & bystanders) can learn from it, whereas a downvote can’t even be traced to who offered it atm (except on Kbin). So it’s frustrating to have to guess - like is DDG really a bad search engine? Then say that!? And how is it bad? Explanations add to the conversation, while downvoting just seems so… lazy.
I can’t even recall the last time I downvoted something
I’ve downvoted things which I know are wrong (people love expressing opinions on things they have no expertise on - just check out the threads on order of operations! 😂), and upvote correct things (the whole point to up/downvote is to push relevant things to the top), otherwise neither usually. Sometimes I use upvote to indicate I liked something someone said.
just seems so… lazy
Yep.
It’s true that down-voting is a form of information, in some contexts. I could even say “Who wants tacos today? Up-vote if yes, down-vote if no”, and it could be fully friendly. It is just that here, in this situation, I didn’t get it.
Ofc it’s this huge tangent from the OP b/c originally there was just a single down-vote, and I was curious if I were missing something wrt DDG, but it sounds like not, just “sometimes people prefer to use Google”. Which sounds like it would apply to every non-Google suggestion though?
And then my asking that meta-question quadrupled the number of down-votes - probably like you said, people consider this tangent not relevant to the OP - but at least as a result of it all I know I am not missing anything important… that anyone is willing to write out:-D. Which seems important, crucial even, info for OP and others to have? About the down-sides to DDG I mean.
But look how many words and messages we had to use and even number of respondents had to participate just to dig out that truth. Even a comment like “you suck, nerd!” - aside from its unfriendliness & irrelevance to the discussion - does act to disambiguate the reasoning behind a down-vote, whereas simply down-voting with no explanation sends a confusing signal with no clear interpretation (except perhaps in the mind of the sender).
This is why I may pile on the downvotes, to signal agreement, but if I am the first to take that initiative, I do at least take the time to reply so they aren’t left wondering why.
Remember the human, and all of that:-).
I’m just annoyed by the regions issues, you’ll get pretty biased results depending in what region you select.
If you try to search for something specific to a region with other selected you’ll find sometime empty results, which shows you won’t get relevant results about a search if you don’t properly select the region.Probably this is more obvious with non technical searches, for example my default region is canada-en and if I try “instituto nacional electoral” I only get a wiki page, an international site and some other random sites with no news, only when I change the region I get the official page ine.mx and news. For me this means kagi hides results from other regions instead of just boosting the selected region’s ones.
Yeah that drives me nuts too. Shopping results for fuckin Home Depot? I’m in Europe you stupid search engine
And searching for a german word always brings up dictionaries from german to english, instead of Wikipedia etc.
Their scumbag CEO really soured kagi for me
Explain? I haven’t heard anything negative
I am not affiliated with the writer in any way.
This is one person rambling about stuff she’s hypothesising
“They didn’t pay sales tax for the first couple of years”
Do you even know how small businesses get off the ground in Europe? Possibly by being exempt from taxes until their profits are high enough?
Says their financial information is impossible to find, then starts telling us exactly what that information is
This is the same as people watching a YouTube channel and just assuming it’s gospel because they watch that channel a lot smh
It’s enough to put a bad taste in my mouth, it ended up on HN if you want to read some more critical commentary (of kagi and of the blogger)
if you want to read some more critical commentary
What I read was a measured and reasoned reply from one of the founders to a small handful of keyboard warriors 😂
I don’t get why “scumbag”.
The blogger shitted on his company, and refuse to hear any explanation from the CEO, if anything, I find him very patient.
I read that when it was originally posted and it just comes across as a one-sided account from someone pissed about something, with no actual thought about the situation put into it.
I’m using kagi as well and have been very pleased with it.
None, I find it myself.
amateur. I just manifest the correct IP address for my desired resource and fetch it with curl
I’m genuinely curious about this. Do you just stick to sites you know? Do you randomly try web addresses when you’re looking for something new?
I was joking.
startpage.com or duckduckgo.
Recently started using startpage and it seems pretty decent.
Searxng
Perplexity
I switch back and forth between DDG and Perplexity. When I quickly want to look something up I find Perplexity quite helpful, just get the answer without filtering through search results.
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, …)
*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.
I run my own searxng instance. It’s amazing.
I also spun up my own yacy instance. It was pretty terrible. It could be good, but you would need a pretty beefy machine with a lot of storage and a lot of time for it to index for it to be anything approaching good.
Somehow I’ve never heard of searxng before. Would you say it’s better than DDG? Are the memory requirements not too high?
Searxng is a search engine aggregator. It sends your search out to all the engines and aggregates the results. No ads, no bullshit, endlessly customizable.
You can use one of the public instances. You don’t have to run your own.
I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.
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.
DuckDuckGo
I use DDG too. When I redirect to google using !g it’s usually out of desperation and it gives me the same bad results in a slightly different order.
I used to have to put !g (redirect to Google) on like half my searches to get the results I wanted. These days, I actually generally prefer DDG’s results over Google’s.
Same, especially on image searches… but Google’s quality has plummeted to a point Bing is better… how the mighty has fallen.
Many tests have proven that Bing is the best search engine for porn. They know their target audience.
Qwant
I’ve been using Qwant as well and it’s actually really refreshing. No nonsense and I feel like I get better results than Kagi and Google and Bing.
I love it so far.
There are some times when Qwant returns bad results where I’ll revert to Google. Just to find worse results…
Jokes aside, Qeant handles most queries well, even local stuff in my native language.
Yesterdsy I stumbled over this: www.mojeek.com Apparently has its own index.
this is correct 😀
Mama, look at me. I’m talking to a .com-owner!!
You are awesome for providing an alternative. Would you mind letting me know what’s the average monthly cost running your infrastructure and if you are paying it as individuals ?
