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What are the highest quality search engines?

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.

lovesickoyster ,

no mention of kagi yet? Son, I am disappoint.

HKayn ,
@HKayn@dormi.zone avatar

I’m really happy with Kagi. The fact that I can blacklist certain domains from showing up in search results is chef’s kiss.

Back when I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, I found myself occasionally using the !g bang to fall back to Google results. So far I haven’t felt the need once in Kagi.

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

I’ve felt the need a couple times but Google results were always worse.

Hazzia ,

This is like the 18th time I’ve seen people on Lemmy say good things about kagi, so I just bit the bullet. I like ecosia but I still end up going back to google for some searches, so I’ll see how kagi does for me.

cosmic_slate , (edited )
@cosmic_slate@dmv.social avatar

I’ve been using it for months and maybe popped back over to Google only a handful of times.

DDG is okay but it’s miserable in comparison. I haven’t tried Ecosia long enough to form a proper opinion but my first impressions weren’t great.

The only people who actively rail against it seem to be the standard group of Fediverse who are… a bit too online 😉

Hazzia ,

Yeah, since posting that i’ve been searching random niche things I’ve attempted with other search engines (like info on obscure instruments and foreign fashion subcultures) and yeah, Kagi is by and large the most useful I’ve tried. I search for something and it’s not just pages of the most normie websites talking about things semi-adjacent to what I searched for, and not an advert in sight! I think I’m in love.

Subverb ,

I’m also very happy with kagi. I get search results with no fluff to sort through or scroll past every time I search. It’s such a breath of fresh air.

Kagi is also doing some interesting things with search and many, many things that let you customize how the results are presented to you.

Also, intesrtingly, kagi is growing rapidly and as yet they have spent literally zero dollars on advertisements. Purely word of mouth.

Danterious , (edited )

Isn’t there that whole controversy with kagi going on about transphobia homophobia stuff?

Edit: apparently it was homophobia not transphobia.

lovesickoyster , (edited )

ah, cancel culture at its best, I won’t be part of it. I took one look at these people, and when I see them cry racism over a completely benign website I know I should just ignore them.

Danterious ,

So separating the art from the artist?

lovesickoyster ,

I guess so. I will say that the trans community would do much better too, if they weren’t so agressive. Personally, I find it really off-putting.

Danterious ,

I don’t think the trans community is agressive.

stepanzak ,

I don’t think the trans community is aggressive. But there are few very loud dumb people like the one you linked. There are people like that in almost every community, but for some reason, in the trans community they manage to get that much attention.

ada ,
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

If your support of a vulnerable minority is dependent on that minority acting in a way you personally approve of, then you don’t support them.

HKayn ,
@HKayn@dormi.zone avatar

Kagi has recently started getting part of its search results from Brave’s search index. That’s literally all there is to it.

MSids ,

They are high thinking people will pay $5/mo for search AND being limited to 300 searches/mo. I avoid subscriptions at all cost, so if I were ever to consider paying for search it would need to be a completely forgettable number like .99/mo.

lovesickoyster ,

you are still paying for search, you just don’t know it (yet).

MSids ,

It’s not lost on me, I get it, don’t pretend like you’re the only one who understands how advertising works on the Internet. That’s the agreement with anything you don’t directly pay for. The fee that Kago is asking for is unreasonable in my opinion.

lovesickoyster , (edited )

sure, we all value things differently. For me this subscription is nothing but a rounding error.

Eddyzh ,

If you are not paying for it you are not the customer but the product.

Caligvla ,
@Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Man I sure love Microsoft, they don’t treat me like a product since I pay for all their services and Windows, unlike that filth Linux which is full of data harvesting CIA spyware and ads.

pingveno ,

Oh yikes, I have to do a lot of searches as part of my job (software developer). I would be through that quota ridiculously quickly. It looks like they have a $10/month tier one up from there with unlimited searches and some extra features, though.

cll7793 OP ,

Due to how important search is, it is not a stable solution to place the trust of the technology, your data privacy, and fair pricing to a corporation. Kagi so far seems great don’t get me wrong! But enshitification from monetary incentives almost always occur. Open source search is the only stable long term solution.

TwinTusks ,
@TwinTusks@bitforged.space avatar

I only heard of Kagi in lemmy, very intrigued, however as I lived in third-world country, the price plan is unfeasible for me to consider.

sunbytes ,

You get the first hundred a month for free.

Maybe you could ration it for when you need high-quality searches?

TwinTusks ,
@TwinTusks@bitforged.space avatar

You get the first hundred a month for free

Thats more rational, I thought it was just the first hundred searches were free.

MargotRobbie ,

The best search I found is by asking questions to real people in forums such as this one. It’s way slower than getting an immediate answer for a question, but the signal to noise ratio is higher.

This is the reason why I think Google is prioritizing reddit so much in recent years, because reddit became one of the only places where you can get real people (well, relatively speaking more than most other parts of the Internet) answering all kind of questions.

cll7793 OP ,

Same! And lemmy has provided the highest quality answers on the internet in my opinion.

dingus ,

Generally, if I want an answer to something, I’ll search whatever I’m looking for followed by “Reddit”. I know a lot of people here hate the site owner, and with good reason, but it actually has made information gathering on the web sane again. Instead of my query coming up with a zillion AI generated webpages, I’ll end up with real people discussing a real issue, and giving their opinions and troubleshooting steps, etc.

I don’t know that it’s necessarily a search engine problem, but just an issue with the way the Internet has become.

Paragone ,

Isn’t Yandex Russian?

I agree with the person who identified that ChatGPT is better than a search-engine, but you have to check it, because, unlike a normal search-engine, the ai-engine, itself sometimes produces disinformaiton, instead of only linking-to disinformation.

Checking is now required in both cases.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Me…

for some alternatives, btw.

_ /\ _

cll7793 OP ,

Thanks! Search results have recently been so bad that I found Yandex sometimes offers better results than Duckduckgo/Google/Bing etc. It’s quite sad actually

haui_lemmy ,

Stupid question: is this a recent development? I remember that seaeching for stuff was no problem just 2 yrs ago. Is it becauae I search more niche stuff or bexause I sont use commands like specific sites and others?

cll7793 OP ,

The enshitification has been a gradual process. Think of it as slowly boiling a frog. I’ve observed the quality of search slowly degrading over the past 2 decades. Just recently, it has gotten to such a severe point that searching has been useless.

haui_lemmy ,

Thanks for elaborating. Do you think there is a reason for this besides „everyone want to make money fast“?

cll7793 OP ,

Conflict of interest is the best explanation. The goal of search engine companies is not to provide information as efficiently as possible but rather something else entirely.

A lack of competition is another factor as well with the monopolization of Google, Microsoft, etc. There may exist better search engines, but the average joe, and even some of us, have trouble finding them. The quality search engines don’t get a chance to expand and or are bought out like with Altavista (Regarded as the best search engines from the golden age). For example, crowdview.ai is the best search engine (outside of kagi from what I’ve heard) but I’m unsure if they will be able to stay afloat for a long enough time to get a chance to expand and take shots at Google.

haui_lemmy ,

Makes sense, thank you. I think the general business climate is not conducive to fair and good companies.

The hierarchical order of things does not allow for the expert to rise to power but for the most ruthless. The biggest companies are just the most ruthless.

1984 ,
@1984@lemmy.today avatar

I don’t think it’s better, I think they serve different functions . I use both Kagi and Chat Gpt a lot for different things.

I heard that Yandex is actually good.

Caligvla ,
@Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Isn’t Yandex Russian?

So?

TwinTusks ,
@TwinTusks@bitforged.space avatar

If I recalled correctly, Yandex is googles equivalence in Russia, so I am quite confused of not calling it mainstream. By that standard, Baidu (ad-filled, trash, Chinese equivalence of Google) is also not mainstream.

algernon ,
@algernon@lemmy.ml avatar

I found that no general purpose search engine will ever serve my needs. Their goal is to index the entire internet (or a very large subset of it), and sadly, a very large part of the internet is garbage I have no desire to see. So I simply stopped using search engines. I have a carefully curated, topical list of links from where I can look up information from, RSS feeds, and those pretty much cover all what I used search for.

Lately, I have been experimenting with YaCy, and fed it my list of links to index. Effectively, I now have a personal search engine. If I come across anything interesting via my RSS feeds, or via the Fediverse, I plug it into YaCy, and now its part of my search library. There’s no junk, no ads, no AI, no spam, and the search result quality is stellar. The downside is, of course, that I have to self-host YaCy, and maintain a good quality index. It takes a lot of effort to start, but once there’s a good index, it works great. So far, I found the effort/benefit ratio to be very much worth it.

I still have a SearxNG instance (which also searches my YaCy instance too, with higher weight than other sources) to fall back to if I need to, but I didn’t need to do that in the past two months, and only two times in the past six.

Subverb ,

Do yourself a favor and try kagi.com.

algernon ,
@algernon@lemmy.ml avatar

And how would that improve anything? Like I said, any general purpose engine is a no-go for me, because they index things I have no desire to ever see in my search results. Kagi is no exception.

Been there, tried it, didn’t find it noticably better than the other general purpose search engines.

Subverb ,

Well I’m not going to argue with you. I’m just saying that kagi has a lot of customizations of search that let you tailor it to your needs.

When you’re not ad-focused you don’t care if the client blocks instagram.com, facebook.com from results.

PeriodicallyPedantic ,

None: SEO is fucking everyone, and it’s not something that search engines can control. If a search engine gets popular, websites will optimize for it.

And its always the websites that optimize the most that you’re least likely to actually want

SmackemWittadic ,
@SmackemWittadic@lemmy.world avatar

I personally use startpage.com, although I’m definitely gonna try out some of the ones recommended on this post!

fin ,

Not a serious answer but here you go

lieu.cblgh.org

it’s a search engine for Webring technology

N0x0n ,

I find my self-hosted searxng pretty okay compared to others. It aggregates most of the time everything I need without the AI, bots generate crap, unecessary noise… Sometimes there are some little search bugs, but It’s foss and free of charge without beeing bombarded with ads, SEO and other braindumping crap !

Asudox ,
@Asudox@lemmy.world avatar

Kagi

metaballism ,

But Yandex sucks for actual search… Except their reverse image search which is really good, altho they nerfed it recently.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

DDG, SearXNG, and occasionally Phind. DDG is my default search engine now.

I don’t know if there’s a “best” amongst these. They each do a job, but they turn up different results. “Best” is the one that lets me avoid Google or Bing. Sometimes I’m forced back to Google, but that’s getting rarer.

Immersive_Matthew ,

I switched to ChatGPT and find it superior to the mess Google and others have made of their search engines. I could never go back to a regular search after using AI.

theywilleatthestars ,

You know half the shit chatgpt says isn’t true, right?

Tinister ,

It's okay for things that are pretty low-stakes. If you ask for cooking or cleaning advice and it hallucinates you're still at square zero regardless.

zero_gravitas ,

If you ask for cooking or cleaning advice and it hallucinates you’re still at square zero regardless.

Unless it tells you to mix bleach and ammonia 😆

andthenthreemore ,
@andthenthreemore@startrek.website avatar

I’ve found bing ai is quite good if you ask for the source after anything it spits out.

bionicjoey , (edited )

These models can invent a source. Their only incentive is to have a convincing conversation with you. They are unconcerned with the truth.

andthenthreemore ,
@andthenthreemore@startrek.website avatar

What I mean is I use it to get the links to those sources. Like when you use Wikipedia as a jumping off point. I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we have the problem Wikipedia sometimes has that the sources used sometimes themselves just cite Wikipedia.

bionicjoey ,

The links to Wikipedia are actual citations to real sources. LLMs basically just generate something that looks like the link to a credible source which might support what it’s said. It doesn’t care if its “source” actually supports what it says.

andthenthreemore ,
@andthenthreemore@startrek.website avatar

The links to Wikipedia are actual citations to real sources

I read an interesting article a few years ago about the Wikipedia source problem. It did a dive into how sources that seem legitimate on Wikipedia can and up citing sources that are less so. They were able to trace back the citations to Wikipedia itself. So no, they’re not always real sources.

LLMs basically just generate something that looks like the link to a credible source which might support what it’s said. It doesn’t care if its “source” actually supports what it says.

Which is why you read the page it has linked for you as a source. Unless you’re trying to say it full on generates a page for you.

Immersive_Matthew ,

I have not found that to be the case at all. While not perfect, it is miles above Google Search and has not more errors than the misinformation any search will yield. It is a significant business advantage as well and those who are not embracing are missing out.

theywilleatthestars ,

I think businesses should be at a disadvantage of all things. Business caused millions of people to starve to death in Bengal.

Immersive_Matthew ,

How so? What size of business? I am a business of just 1 person.

cll7793 OP ,

I found the original GPT-4 to be great at technical search questions! Though unfortunately the quality has been getting worse ever since.

Immersive_Matthew ,

I use ChatGPT 4+ extensively for coding and it has only gotten better over the course of the pastyear for me. I am really surprised how smart it is actually, and of course how silly and delusional it can be at times too which is always so weird but even that has improved. Its intelligence has different quirks than a human for sure.

nycki ,

oooh, wiby got a .org? nice.

I don’t know about self-hosted search yet, but I think that’s one place where federation might actually be a feature and not overhead.

cll7793 OP ,

Wiby is great! I love using it to discover sites. It’s very similar to spirit of search engines from the early internet. Though it’s not a general search engine it has its specialized uses so I thought I’d mention it

JusticeForPorygon ,
@JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world avatar

I use Firefox + Brave. Not for everyone, but I appreciate that it keeps the modern browser look without all the edge/chrome spam.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

These are not search engines.

JusticeForPorygon ,
@JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world avatar

Brave has a browser and a search engine. I use the search engine with the Firefox browser.

hal_5700X ,
@hal_5700X@lemmy.world avatar

Are you talking about Brave Search?

JusticeForPorygon ,
@JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world avatar

No I use the Firefox browser with the brave search engine

hal_5700X ,
@hal_5700X@lemmy.world avatar

What you guys think about mojeek?

Mojeek ,
@Mojeek@lemmy.ml avatar

biased but i think they’re doing just swell (and getting better by the day) ;)

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