It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.

Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.

If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?

EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.

    • Z4rK@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3611·
      10 months ago

      It’s not, really, I switched from Google some years ago and had accepted my faith with DuckDuckGo, but then tried out Kagi. I use search so much daily for work, the relief of getting quality results again is immense and probably saves me hours per week. I get much better results from Kagi than I got at the end from Google, and I can tune them to my liking:

      • block Pinterest results when I search for images,
      • downprioritize shopping results,
      • rewrite all Reddit links to go to old.reddit.com,
      • unamp google AMP links
      • summarize long texts / documents
      • quick answer from the top 5 results

      …and so on and so on. It’s just so effective.

    • m_randall@sh.itjust.works
      307·
      10 months ago

      I always fear it comes across that way when I recommend it to people here. I’m just a very happy user and want to see them succeed.

      • cabbage@piefed.social
        15·
        10 months ago

        I find it expensive for what it is (given that I still get a limited number of searches) and I’m not comfortable with some of their ways (I don’t want anything to do with AI, and I the idea they have of being nonpolitical seems dangerously naive to me). I also don’t like supporting non-FOSS projects all that much.

        Still, it’s the best search I’ve found, and I’m paying every month until I find something better. It’s worth it.

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
      141·
      10 months ago

      If I had stock/investments in a search engine, you better fucking believe Id also have a bunch of bots crawling for the terms “What is the best search engine” and immediately hijack the convo with bots upvoting my search engine.

      I cannot explain how easy it is to do this.

        • TheMinions@lemmy.world
          35·
          10 months ago

          I know nothing about Kagi, except that it requires an account and is paid. So I assume all searches are tied to that account and there is no way to do an anonymous search.

          Disregard I’m a fool

          • Rexios@lemm.ee
            106·
            10 months ago

            We care about data protection: We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We do not log or associate searches with an account. More at our privacy policy.

            Literally the first paragraph on their website

            • cll7793@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              152·
              10 months ago

              The Patriot Act and Snowden’s leaks have shown companies will go against their privacy policy to appease governments. Search engines especially are targeted by five eyes with the PRISM program where copies of all your data, linked to your payment, are sent to Five Eyes and stored. Gag orders and legal threats prevent disclosure, as has been done with prior tech companies who have tried to push back against this.

              Be wary of trusting corporations with your data as monetization is a powerful incentive.

                • kautau@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  9 months ago

                  With lemmy you are trusting whatever instance your account is on, and really any federated instances since they could choose to hold onto your posts and comments

            • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
              84·
              10 months ago

              I don’t know if I believe that. It’s a paid service, so the only way to enforce that unpaid users cannot search is to take a search request and check if it is coming from your account. Same with basic things like rate limiting requests. You literally need to associate your requests to an account to make basic functionality like this work.

              If they do this but just don’t log it, then that means there is no way for their devs to ever debug issues users have or to monitor their services. I’m highly skeptical.

              Also, “trust us” is something I’ve heard too many times.

              • random8847@lemmy.world
                10·
                10 months ago

                It’s a paid service, so the only way to enforce that unpaid users cannot search is to take a search request and check if it is coming from your account

                That’s not the same as logging.

                You literally need to associate your requests to an account to make basic functionality like this work.

                They just need to check the session of the user on the fly during the search operation. Once the search is done they don’t need to persist any record linking the search and the user.

              • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyz
                6·
                10 months ago

                They don’t need to tie the searches to an account. They log them anonymously. From their privacy policy:

                Absent from our logs are any identifying information about your client. As such, any query or traffic logging that we do cannot be tied back to your account, ensuring that Kagi developers are the only people that the logs will ever be useful to.

            • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
              98·
              10 months ago

              and am I supposed to believe such a bold claim? the only reason they give is “trust me, bro. I pinky promise I’m not logging anything”.

              You have one account, every search query you make is associated with that account. And even if they aren’t selling that ultra sensitive data, I’m sure they are keeping logs to prevent abuse and fix bugs which could be used when a third party gains access to their servers (malicious actors, law enforcement, etc).

              And that’s assuming that Kagi is not mining and or selling any data themselves, which is a bold assumption given how little we know about their proprietary product. If at least they published the source code, but no. I’m supposed to trust a proprietary black box which could potentially be linking every search query back to me.

              • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
                5·
                10 months ago

                I don’t trust or ever plan on getting Kagi, but in their defense, the “trust me bro” is a large portion of privacy services. I use Mullvad VPN and think they have a great reputation that have proved themselves. I have no however, personally checked the servers to verify myself what’s running, so I am trusting then. Even when running open source software, I know none of us here have actually looked into every line of code of our browsers or our phones to see what’s all running. It’s simply unfeasible, so trust and reputation is still required at the end of the day.

                • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
                  41·
                  10 months ago

                  That’s absolutely true. The problem is that, to make use of VPN services, it’s required to have an account or other identifier.

                  But that’s no true for search engines. If I wanted to, I could make completely anonymous searches using SearXNG or DDG from different IPs and they would not have any way to correlate the search queries.

                  That’s not true with Kagi and it’s a completely unnecessary privacy risk you’re taking when using it.

        • dwalin@lemmy.world
          113·
          10 months ago

          Not op, nor i have any experience with kagi, but i suspect there is no way to do an Anonymous search with kagi.

        • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
          74·
          10 months ago

          copypasting the other comment I made in this thread:

          and am I supposed to believe such a bold claim? the only reason they give is “trust me, bro. I pinky promise I’m not logging anything”.

          You have one account, every search query you make is associated with that account. And even if they aren’t selling that ultra sensitive data, I’m sure they are keeping logs to prevent abuse and fix bugs which could be used when a third party gains access to their servers (malicious actors, law enforcement, etc).

          And that’s assuming that Kagi is not mining and or selling any data themselves, which is a bold assumption given how little we know about their proprietary product. If at least they published the source code, but no. I’m supposed to trust a proprietary black box which could potentially be linking every search query back to me.

          • DeadlineX@lemm.ee
            1·
            9 months ago

            I don’t have any skin in this game. I just wanted to point out that you went from “given how privacy invasive this particular entity is”

            To

            “… assuming… how little we know… could potentially”

            That’s a pretty big leap from a bold and confident assertion that an entity is doing something all the way to saying that entity maybe could be doing something but we don’t know. It’s just a weird logical leap to me, and I felt compelled to mention it.

    • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      8·
      10 months ago

      I’m glad I’m finally not the only one feeling this way. I’ve been seeing them aggressively pushed seemingly out of the blue for months now. Especially for what is such an awful deal and zero evidence to their claims, just citing the marketing page at face value.

  • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
    49·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Deceptichum@kbin.social
      25·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • cll7793@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      13·
      10 months ago

      Altavista was ahead of their time. The modern internet desperately needs a technical search engine.

  • kd45@lemm.ee
    444·
    10 months ago

    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?

    • Dave@lemmy.world
      375·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • Scrollone@feddit.it
      9·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
      113·
      10 months ago

      It is as useless. After all, it’s just Bing. But if the results are good enough for you, then why bother finding something else.

    • overcast5348@lemmy.world
      2·
      10 months ago

      It’s not as bad as Google yet, but I find myself getting terrible or no results quite a few times.

      Ex: if I’m looking for a niche blog post from example.com, just entering the keywords doesn’t return the right result, if anything at all. I have to add “site:example.com” and the right link shows up on top.

      It’s kinda amusing when this happens, but I keep using ddg anyway because bing and Google had the same issue for the same keywords when I ran into the issue.

    • Hildegarde@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
    192·
    10 months ago

    Yandex was way better for searches in russian sources, but it came to shit just like google and also excludes whatever russian government don’t like at that point. I searched for some software in it multiple timea and the first link was some noname, probably malware site. It also promotes it’s own malware like browser with questionable russian security sertificates and their own Alexa. I’d honestly not include it in any list.

    I like DDG and don’t switch from it that much. I’ve also heard Kagi as paid search engine is good, but I’ve never tried it.

  • DolphinMath@slrpnk.netEnglish
    193·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      181·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • ratman150@sh.itjust.works
        16·
        10 months ago

        I’ve been using Kagi for 3 months now I think? And I’ve found it to be extremely useful for research…to a point, my only real issue is that after the first or so series of results it either doesn’t offer anything further or just no longer is showing relevant results to my search. Honestly though I’ve been very happy with Kagi and continue to pay the 10/month but if I do find something even better I’d happily switch. I’m not married to any particular search engine (well …least not to the extent of using Google services).

        If you’re skeptical just give it a try I think they have a trial system in place.

    • cheribbit@lemmy.world
      2·
      9 months ago

      THANK YOU for mentioning startpage! I have not heard of them but I haven’t liked using DDG very much so I’ve begrudgingly using google in private mode (and then I always forget to switch back and forth)

  • Toes♀@ani.social
    172·
    10 months ago

    I’ve found duckduckgo works fine for things that aren’t recent.

    Controversially the bing gpt chat bot works alarming well.

  • Krucian@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago

    I self host a searxng instance and I find the combination of bing, duckduckgo and qwant as the source engines to return decent results. You can use a public instance and choose those engines in settings.

    • Squizzy@lemmy.world
      4·
      10 months ago

      I’m specifically looking to replace DDG, they have really dropped in quality lately and are very clearly going back on their word for not having you in a bubble with specific to you results.

    • cll7793@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I found public instances often have issues connecting to many search engines at once, will look into self hosting it. Thanks!

  • Crafter72@lemmy.world
    10·
    10 months ago

    For everyone who uses searxng, is it great for day to day browsing? Do I require to host my own instance or the setup is as easy as requiring to add “searxng” option on my browser app?

    I’m interested to move away from google as it becomes shitty everyday and loses its effectiveness for advanced query (based on my own result compared during 2013 up to pre covid). Bing have weird result on my region so cannot use it, ddg only for occasional use.

    Thanks!

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
    9·
    10 months ago

    Is “super SEO sites” a catch all term for those 99% filler websites that have a tomato soup recipe (in theory) but actually start out with, “Historical evidence seems to suggest that the tomato was first cultivated in the territory that would eventually become Guam back in 1464…”

    I’ve wondered if we had a common reference term for those? I wish it didn’t have a positive connotation though…

    • Inucune@lemmy.world
      4·
      10 months ago

      Those plus sites that are lists of buzz words that have nothing to do with the actual site.

  • chirospasm@lemmy.ml
    2114·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • xbit00@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      The ability to summarize pages directly on the search results page is a big win for me. I also use the kagi summarizer several times a day to summarize youtube videos that I’m interested in but don’t want to sit through the whole video.

      • DrFuggles@feddit.de
        71·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • 𝐘Ⓞz҉@lemmy.world
          13·
          9 months ago

          Ooooh that’s crazy. Why are people not joining fediverse ? I think we need some marketing people to band together and create easy guides on how to sign up and share it on Facebook, YouTube etc

      • wahming@monyet.ccEnglish
        71·
        10 months ago

        How WOULD you differentiate bots from happy users, anyway? They certainly look like organic accounts to me

  • 1984@lemmy.today
    2014·
    10 months ago

    Kagi is the highest quality for sure. There isn’t a better one, I have tried all of them except perplexity, and that’s more like chat gpt rather than search.

    • MikeT@lemm.ee
      12·
      10 months ago

      I’ve been slowly pivoting toward Perplexity.AI as the search engine. It basically does what I do, search + find the resources and summarize it but it is automatic with Perplexity.AI.

      I rather pay them 20$ because that is saving me time a lot (and time is money in my case). Kagi’s search is okay but I can get nearly the same by using ublocklist on Bing or DDG for my use case.