6mo ago

Search Engine Alternative

I've been using DuckDuck Go since leaving Google Search, but that seems to be the first step away. I'm not keen on their AI assist. I tried Start Page, but the first four results were ads. I don't mind paying a small fee for good search. So Brave Search or Kagi?

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Have you tried adding the no AI version of Duckduckgo to your browser search options? I believe it's just adding "https://noai.duckduckgo.com/".
It's definitely been a QOL improvement for me.
- Nice!!!
  
  I did it a week ago and it's been great not having that AI summary at the top. I don't know if this also disregards AI for image searches as there seemed to be an additional fix for that.

I am a kagi user on the $5 plan and love it.
- I tried Kagi because I was excited by the hype and would gladly pay a fee for superior search thats not google. But, my experience wasn't great:
  Couldn't reliably give me local results. E.g., searching for "pizza near me" would render results from a combination of my local city, Sydney and those in Singapore.
  UI needs some basic improvements. Rules of font spacing for starters.
  It was slow. like at least 500 ms for me to get a page of results, even though I was pretty sure it was using my closest AWS region.
  I hope this doesn't come off as too negative--I don't want to be disparaging. Contrarily, I would love to hear your thoughts as a supporter of the platform. It could be that I was using it wrong, or theres some mitigating features that I missed. As I said, I would gladly pay to not be the product.
  
  Degoogling comes with sacrifices.

I use Kagi and honestly I really like it… I am a paid user though so yeah to get the most out of it you gotta pay
- Which subscription tier do you use?
  
  I also use Kagi. Just start with the trial, upgrade to the $5 starter tier when you run out, then upgrade to the pro $10 tier if you hit the limit. It appropriately apportions things if you've only used half your month.
  I'm on the $10 pro tier as I use over the 300 searches a month in the $5 starter tier ($10 is unlimited).
  Kagi has AI on request. If you put a question mark on the end of your search query, you get an AI response. No question mark, no AI.
  I think Kagi is worth trying for other reasons, but probably only for people who $10 a month is not a significant cost. It's not better than food, but it does let me block all Pinterest results so I never see them.
  
  Yeah I would say start with the smaller one and its very easy to upgrade/downgrade. For me I do the highest tier one because I work in tech and I want to use all the premium LLM stuff hah

Absolutely Kagi. Its worth the small fee and has so KANU useful features that make combing through the bullshit way easier. We use it daily.
- Do you ise the Orion browser?
  
  No, we used Brave but switched to Librewolf today. Like it much better.

SearXNG or Kagi
- SearXNG all day!!

I'm sticking with DDG, it's not perfect but still better than Google

Maybe take a look at Qwant.com.

Searx has been excellent for me, but it's not the best option if you want to search by date relevancy. I'll find that I combine DDG and Searx mostly because of this.
- You can just enable ddg within the searxng instance

If you don't mind keeping a cookie around, DDG has search settings that let you turn off AI Assist and advertisements.
https://duckduckgo.com/settings

It's funny I was literally just posting about my search setup today lol. So that's all what I use, if any of that works.

I'm glad for this thread because I use duck duck Go but I hate it. Become trash in the last year.

searxng or metasearxng is yhe way to go imo
- Can you post a metasearxng instance link?
  
  https://searx.neocities.org/ for clearweb http://7tcuoi57curagdk7nsvmzedcxgwlrq2d6jach4ksa3vj72uxrzadmqqd.onion/ for tor (i was not able to connect to tor one) i got both off searx.space

Try Mojeek. I don't like, at all, that it's based in the UK, but at least it's not Gringoland. Easy-to-use, own web index, truly independent company with own ad syndication (no Bing).

SearXNG is good. If you're not self-hosting, make sure to have a shortlist of alternative instances. I like instances that pull from google, but those also tend to suffer from rate-limiting.
- What is your goto instance? I use https://searx.foss.family/
  
  It's a toss-up between opnxng.com, priv.au, and searx.tiekoetter.com for me since they all don't have perfect uptimes. I have a bias for ones with shorter URLs and sometimes I wonder if other people do too.

If you don't mind paying, Kagi's the gold standard imo. Been using it for years. The pricing has been pretty garbo at times but they've settled on a good model now. Used it extensively for research back when I was a freelance writer and it's stuck around as my general-use search engine. It's great for research, functionally really well designed.

4get

Swisscows.com, searxNG (federated)

ononoki , or any other free instance of searxng on the web.

42 comments