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.

138 comments

I find all the kagi mentions to be very suspicious
- 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.
  
  … suspicious
  
  You can redirect old reddit with the tampermonkey extension
  https://greasyfork.org/scripts/44669
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Your comment belongs higher. When given the opportunity to make money by social media advertising sometimes in the thousands or millions, companies, share holders, and conflict of interest groups take it. Cablemod's burning adapters, cryptocurrency scams, payed positive youtube reviews are some great examples. In general there is no honor system and its best to assume anything that can be abused will.
  Also manipulating votes is incredibly effective towards swaying public opinion due to the bandwagon effect. Spend a days worth of effort making fake accounts and downvoting any opinion you see as undesirable and most people will follow suit. This is especially bad in echo chambers like on twitter, reddit, etc.
  I wish a broader audience could be aware of this. The best I can do is try to spread the word.
  Sources:
  The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc
  Cablemod Recall: https://old.reddit.com/r/cablemod/comments/18o7bnv/planned_voluntary_safety_recall_of_cablemod/
  FTX Scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX
  Bandwagon Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
  Echo Chamber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
- same. specially considering how privacy invasive kagi is.
  
  How is it privacy invasive?
  
  How is it privacy invasive? For example, compared to competition like Google?
- 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.
- Why? It's a great search engine that a lot of people find extremely useful.
- I've mentioned it a few times because it's actually good.

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.
- 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.
  
  I believe yahoo killed altvista before google came and finished it off
- Altavista was ahead of their time. The modern internet desperately needs a technical search engine.

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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Some results come from Bing.
- Hmm, I did notice a sudden severe drop in quality recently. Perhaps they are A/B testing something.
  
  ddg has been going downhill for awhile now. they changed something significant a couple years back that just made results, especially after the first half-page, absolute shit.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Google doesn't do that properly anymore, either, much like the "literal search" (quotes) - used to work, now it's a crap shoot.

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.

I've found duckduckgo works fine for things that aren't recent.
Controversially the bing gpt chat bot works alarming well.
- The bing chat bot scares me a bit. I don't want to use bing out of principle, but at this point they're just flirting too damn hard.
- DDG is just Bing, so ...
  
  Are you a bot?

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.
- 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.
  
  I think you meant to write ass-driven
  
  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.
- 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)
- Took wayyy to long to find something not recommending Kagi.

Kagi

This site collects quite a few web search engines: https://www.searchenginemap.com/

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

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!
- pick a host from searx.space
  Might be a good idea to bookmark this too because sometimes some hosts go down.
  
  Appreciate it, will read more in documentations 👍🏽

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

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.
- 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.
- Lol kagi bots spotted!
  
  Beep boop, my dude.
  
  How WOULD you differentiate bots from happy users, anyway? They certainly look like organic accounts to me
  
  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.

Come on over to Kagi! You do have to pay but I use a search engine dozens of times per day so I’m not too bothered by it.
- I've heard a lot of great things about Kagi, though the search limit and subscription is a little off-putting. A self-hosted Kagi would be amazing though!
  
  Kagi has a free trial, 100 searches for free, so you can try it out and see if you like it or not.
  
  Why would they do all that work to create a better search engine than Google and give it away for free? What is going to pay their bills?
  Google pays their bills by selling your data and spying on your searches, not to mention they are morally corrupt. Kagi pays their bills with your monthly sub. Seems a lot better.
  
  They now have unlimited searches for $10/mo. That’s what got me to try it out.
  You are correct though. I really do not like having all of my search history tied to my credit card (and then me). What helps me justify that is that instead of me being the product like google, by paying I’ve become the customer. Hopefully that incentivizes keeping them on the up and up.
  I did come across searnxg in this thread. It looks like that can be self hosted so I’m gonna give that a try as well.
- Not when they collaborate with brave. Fuck that!
  
  They don’t “collaborate” with Brave, just use its search API.
- The owner of Kagi is a homophobic piece of shit.
  Just use searxng.
  
  If you are going to look for perfect companies, you will look forever, and probably use Google while you are looking.
  It's not worth it. Just use something better than Google even if it's flawed, because everything had flaws.
  
  Where did you get that from?

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.

Those AI ones like Perplexity.ai, Kagi FastGPT and even Copilot (Bing Chat) give good results not just in the responses, but also in the links they return.
- 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.

I mostly use bing now. I like that it can answer complex queries and provides sources.
Don't have much trouble not finding things.
- Its nice when you are deep in Microsoft already from your company and get BingChat Enterprise included anyways.
  Its slower than OpenAI GPT4 at times and its alot more restricted, but it gets the job done mostly.
  You need to hack the UI to make it nice, unlock longer inputs, disable search tool at-will, disable synthetic streaming responses (consistent token speed, but takes longer overall)
  Simple query via DDG, complex stuff and ChatBot stuff via BingChat Enterprise.
  
  I thought the AI assistant was free? I just downloaded the bang app and I just use the AI assistant whenever I search for anything now.
  I don't use any sort of enterprise, or full disclosure know what any of the other things you said are, any of those options or parameters.
  But bing's really impressed me lately, haha, so I still use it.
  Actually on my desktop, I just use the regular Bing search, which I do now find superior to Google for just finding quick accurate answers for basic stuff.
  It's still crazy to me a year later after switching all my default search engines to Bing after using Google for so long, but Google search is just such trash now, it's insane.

I like the french one "qwant".

Brave Search works really well for me, and they have AI responses at the top of the page now that are really good.
- Not sure why you got downvoted like crazy, but Brave legitimately has a great search engine. It also uses its own crawlers unlike DDG, Startpage or Kagi who are really just meta search engines piggybacking off other companies’ results.
  
  Good thing I wasn't replying to the down voters. OP got my response and that is what I wanted. 🙂
- Thanks! Never given brave a try before

138 comments