What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?
I don’t know what is the best but the clearest thing to me is that each day Google is getting worse…
Definitely. So many searches lately will return results that only partially match the search terms. What’s even the point of searching if you’re just going to show a bunch of unrelated results?
I hate that so much
Sorry, looks like you searched for stuff that isn’t really popular. How about these unrelated Facebook and Pintrest links instead?
I actually prefer Google for shopping. Just turn off your adblocker, search for a particular item you want to buy and bam your first 3 to 4 pages are retailers pushing the product with their prices listed (with a touch of scam websites that I presume pay for advertising). Anything else I add ‘Reddit’ or just watch a few YouTube videos depending on what kind of answers I’m looking for
More and more I have been using the Bing “chat” search. It does a search, filters through the results and summarizes the answer with links to the sites it found them on.
For certain types of search it is a huge time saver of scrolling through results to find answers on various pages.
Over all bing search it self isn’t bad.
I recently switched to Bing after years of disappointment from Google and months of disappointment from DDG. Bing is pretty disappointing too, but less so, so far. I tried to use the chat feature a couple of days ago, but it said I have to download the app. Nah… fuck these tech companies and their apps.
The “preview” for the chat feature requires the app or edge on desktop currently but I do find myself turning to it every time I get frustrated with a google search these days.
Less disappointing is probably the best discrimination as you said.
I signed up for Kagi.com right after posting the above. I saw someone’s recommended here in this thread and said what the heck!
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Topics like this remind me of the pre-Google era. If Google can’t see the damage they’ve done, they deserve to vanish like the ones they’ve vanished in the early years.
duckduckgo.com only had 2 ads that were clearly identified when I just tried it. no idea how manipulated the rest of it is.
I really want to like DuckDuckGo, but the results are never right. I always end up going back to Google. But I’m a professional programmer, so it might be different for me.
i gotta use duck duck go on my work laptop. no sugarcoat its dogshit google is still better even tho google is getting worse
For a brief moment in time search engines were perfected. Then they veered off course. All of them did. Why though.
Remember when you could list vaguely some words related an obscure movie to Google. Then it would tell you the movie you’re thinking of. That’s been nerfed.
Tangentially related. What’s the deal with search engines of online stores. It’s like they aren’t even search engines at all. They’re doing nothing more than showing me products/sellers they want me to buy from. Digikey lets you drill down to precise specification filters. I wish all search engines could be like that.
Actually the vague movie description thing was due to imdb’s movie tags that users had set on the movie and search engine was doing the simples things it could i.e. “all this one word links point to this movie, perhaps it is this?”
I use Swisscows and Metager, and usually find what I need, if I don’t I retry the query with Startpage.
yandex.com if you don’t mind ru gov spying on you. Though you can use it with tor or VPN for privacy.
Here’s my experience with some search engines:
A Tier – Gives me the closest results.
- Google: A classic and oftentimes, it gets what I want. A lot of the links are redirects which is annoying.
- Kagi: It’s paid but it has a lot of features like “lenses” and “quick answer”. The results are pretty good. It gives me good articles and PDFs instead of a blogspot post.
- You.com: The WORST UI EVER but the results are surprisingly decent. It’s pretty close to Kagi. It might actually be the same thing. It also has an AI chatbot but I don’t think it’s as good as Bing’s or OpenAI’s.
B Tier – Gives me decent results.
- Startpage:
It used to use Google search results but they switched to Bing. It is worse than Google.EDIT: Search results are still closer to Google but they “incorporate Microsoft Bing results”. From my experience, it filters out some of Google results that were very useful for me. Their widgets (particularly the Wikipedia one) sometimes displays irrelavant information. - DuckDuckGo: Results are worse than Google. One time a referral link came up in one of my searches.
- Bing: There’s no dark mode. The AI chat tool is pretty nice and is comparable to the OpenAI one (significantly better than Google’s Bard). Search results are worse than Google.
- Yandex: Search results are similar to DuckDuckGo.
- Ecosia: Search results are similar to the ones above.
C Tier – Gives me poor results.
- Brave: Search results feel so inconsistent and out of place. Maybe worse than the ones above.
- Mojeek: Independent search engine. Results aren’t very good.
Open Source Front Ends - Results quality varies.
- SearXNG: It depends on which instance you’re using. Sometimes search results error out due to rate limiting but you still get results anyway. It has a lot of options and configs so it fits to your liking so you can choose which search engines you want to include.
- LibreX: Actually one of my favorites since I’ve never encountered errors due to rate limiting but using it to search for images is terribly slow. It has a cool feature where you can add front ends like Libreddit and Wikiless. It also has a built-in torrent search engine.
- Whoogle: The UI isn’t very good and it performs poorly on most public instances. A smaller or private instance might be worth looking into. It uses Google search results.
F Tier – It sucks.
- Qwant: Not available in my country.
If anyone knows of any other search engine not in this list, let me know so I can try it out.
I am not sure whether DDG or SearX results are optimised by someone, but it is different from what I would see on Google for a given topic.
DDG seems to get most of their results from Bing, but they do tweak it a bit themselves. From the link:
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
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For my job and work. I use Kagi. Its not free, but the search returns are very good, you can filter domains out from your returns, it supports custom “bangs” ala duck duck go and theres no tracking of queries. There are also specific filters for things like programming, or recipes for cooking etc. Theres also no ads, you are paying and are the customer. They are trying to establish a sustainable model to run on that allows for privacy.
I find it quite refreshing. It isnt free and I generally hate subscription stuff, but this is easily one I dont mind as it pays dividends often when searching for work.
Wow. I don’t mind paying for stuff if it’s good. But seriously $5/month seems pretty expensive, and you only get 300 searches. $25 for unlimited searches, which seems like an insane amount of money.
The problem here is so many people are used to tech running at a loss on the books and/subsiding operating costs by selling customer data and analytics.
The reality is running tech companies is hard and expensive. The money here goes straight back into development. It’s just out of beta since march, and they have increased their quotas since I have been a customer.
But people are spoiled by free where you aren’t a customer. You are the product. If you are cool with that it’s fine. This isn’t the product for you.
For me, I like the idea and the searches are better than DDG/bing and startpage/google. So it’s worth the cost personally. I would rather pay that than say…Amazon prime where I’m both the customer and the product.
I mean yes I agree with all your points. But I stand by the assertion that it’s too expensive. I could handle $5/month, perhaps, but 300 searches is waaaay too few. That’s 10 per day. I did 10 searches this morning before I got out of bed.
For unlimited searches it’s twice the cost of a streaming service. Yet it has negligible bandwidth costs, and significantly less storage cost, probably less development cost. Sure a small user base too, but at that price they’re really going to struggle to grow it!
It’s really just too expensive.
At $10 it’s 1000 unique searches. I search a ton and have it on my phone etc. haven’t exceeded the limit. I am at 600 searches right now, with a renewal due on the 24th.
They are writing a search engine from scratch. They don’t just randomize bing or google searches. So I think you may be underestimating the operating and especially development costs, probably hosting costs too.
But to each his own. Also those streaming services you mention. They don’t really turn a profit, and definitely don’t on subscriptions.
Probably the new Google search that uses Bard. It’s not public yet, but you can ask for access.
Edit: It’s currently referred to as “generative search”, and you can use it on Android if you sign up for the beta version of the app on the play store.
Does it link to it’s sources yet?
