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.
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I switched from DuckDuckGo to Waterfox’s paid search engine (https://search.waterfox.com/) because I wanted to send a few dollars per month to a Firefox fork. It uses Google’s search index, so the results are good, and it has no AI-generated responses. I just want a Firefox fork to be financially sustainable, so I’m paying for it. I don’t think it has any advantages over noai.duckduckgo.com, though.
I’ll also check https://marginalia-search.com/ every once in a while, since I like the idea of an independent search engine with their own index. It also has some creative features around discovering small, related websites. Feels like an “early internet” search engine.
Startpage
searxng (self hosted). But I understand not everyone can host something. There are public instances out there as well.
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Not necessarily.
You configure which engines you want it to use.
Although lately the list of engines which are working well seems to be quite small.
Yes, but my search data doesn’t leave my house. Also since my IP changed multiple times a week (not quite daily, but close), I prefer this to using someone else’s instance. There is some obfuscation to be gained by searching through a public insurance as well, but my insurance is still used by multiple people, not just me.
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I use Startpage, everything else kind of sucks imo.
I just started using this one. So far I’m looking it. The Shopping tab is useless, but the search and image results are refreshingly different from the garbage you get from Google or DuckDuckGo.
I forgot it had a shopping tab. I never used it in any other search engine that I can recall. Google has been ass for many years. I stopped using it years ago. I’ll take Yandex over Google at this point. Also, Yandex is good for sailing the seven seas.
I use Qwant. Works great for everything I want it to do. Or ecosia if im on safari.
i used to use duckduckgo, still sometimes do. but i switched to qwant and i think i like it better
I use Qwant and Ecosia.
Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.
For those who don’t know, most “independent” search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they’re still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.
Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they’re collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they’re already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.
I’m using paid Kagi subscription, and it makes searching for stuff feel like it used to before Big Tech broke the internet. I can actually find what I’m looking for again.
The “SlopStop” feature is worth it alone, but I love how I can choose what types of results and sources to prioritize.
10/10 Highly recommended.
Duck no AI version
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.
TIL about that option, thanks.
I’m quite crazy:
- Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
- Good for finding technical stuff, and sometimes recipes! I often find cool blogs this way.
- SearxNG via farside.link
- Unfortunately (and understandably) many of these sites use Anubis now, so I have to turn on JavaScript, and thanks to Google’s ratelimits the results are either fantastic or not helpful at all
- But, the public instances can work, so I try with 3 instances before moving on
Depending on the thing I’m searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that’s as good:
- Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata
- Some other wikis
- Lemmy (of course!)
- Peertube and podcast indexes
- Websites of grocery shops near me
Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.
I’d quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It’d be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I’m doing manually, prioritise my YaCy index, but use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.
- Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
I use DDG on everything, even the work PC. It works well enough for my purposes. I don’t even hate duck.ai and it can be useful, but I’ll double check anything I take from it.
Yes, I think DDG is actually being quite reasonable with its AI integrations so I have nothing against it and would rather have it than not.
I’m using Metager - you pay a very small amount per search, the amount is defined by which indexes and options you configure to use. It’s pretty cheap - I loaded up 10€ a few months ago and still have about 2/3 left, and it’s adfree. There is also the option to use completely anonymous tokens to “pay” for your searches, which uses a little bit more of your balance, but can’t be tied back to your account. Search settings are saved only locally in the history - using the browser extension prevents losing your settings when deleting browser data.
i personally use ecosia
Ecosia
