11mo ago

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.

Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
Yandex: https://yandex.com/

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.

70 comments

no mention of kagi yet? Son, I am disappoint.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  I've felt the need a couple times but Google results were always worse.
- 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.
  
  you are still paying for search, you just don't know it (yet).
  
  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.
  
  If you are not paying for it you are not the customer but the product.
- 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.
  
  You get the first hundred a month for free.
  Maybe you could ration it for when you need high-quality searches?
- Isn't there that whole controversy with kagi going on about ~~transphobia~~ homophobia stuff?
  Edit: apparently it was homophobia not transphobia.
  
  Kagi has recently started getting part of its search results from Brave's search index. That's literally all there is to it.
- 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.

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

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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Metasearch_engines
for some alternatives, btw.
_ /\ _
- 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
  
  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?
- 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.
- 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.
- Isn’t Yandex Russian?
  So?

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.
- Do yourself a favor and try kagi.com.
  
  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.

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

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

Not a serious answer but here you go
https://lieu.cblgh.org/
it’s a search engine for Webring technology

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

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 !

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.

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.
- 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

Kagi

What you guys think about mojeek?
- biased but i think they're doing just swell (and getting better by the day) ;)

I hate to say it but I've taken to doing a lot of common searches with bard instead. It is a different experience but more interactive and easier to refine. It gets stuff wrong but compared to a basic Google search Bard is more useful.
I feel like Google is just a directory for looking up web sites now.

I use Firefox + Brave. Not for everyone, but I appreciate that it keeps the modern browser look without all the edge/chrome spam.
- These are not search engines.
  
  Brave has a browser and a search engine. I use the search engine with the Firefox browser.
- Are you talking about Brave Search?
  
  No I use the Firefox browser with the brave search engine

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.
- You know half the shit chatgpt says isn't true, right?
  
  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.
  
  I've found bing ai is quite good if you ask for the source after anything it spits out.
  
  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.
- I found the original GPT-4 to be great at technical search questions! Though unfortunately the quality has been getting worse ever since.
  
  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.

70 comments