DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo

Searxng

Searxng.

I've begun to pay for Kagi.com

I wouldn't say that it "blows my mind" or anything, but simply that it seems to work as expected (which is more than what I can say for Google). There's also a "Fediverse" button on Kagi.com, so it can search lemmy.world (and more??).

Kagi. I like it

I use my own self hosted SearXNG.

I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.

Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.

Theoretical search: "slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie"
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever "celebrities" have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.

DuckDuckGo as a default with Google as fallback depending on what I'm looking for. For lemmy the default search of my instance works well enough so haven't tried external engines.

I'm mainly using duckduckgo for 7 years now. If I can't find something with it, I try startpage, which sometimes helps.

I run my own searxng instance. It's amazing.

I also spun up my own yacy instance. It was pretty terrible. It could be good, but you would need a pretty beefy machine with a lot of storage and a lot of time for it to index for it to be anything approaching good.

Ecosia. These days it's better than Google.

Yesterdsy I stumbled over this: www.mojeek.com Apparently has its own index.

A combination of SearXNG and Stract, for the most part. They're definitely not perfect (yet), but they mostly get the job done! And I think they both have a lot of cool filters and refinement settings that I haven't even taking advantage of so far.

For niche stuff it seems like a lot of hyper targeted search engines are popping up, like Sepia Search for PeerTube.

Kagi

Kagi. I haven't had a failed search results in months, and when I do google can't find it either so I haven't lost anything.

Kagi.

I know, I know... I just really like it.

Perplexity

I'm using Kagi. I find that it does a better job at finding "legitimate" sites rather than blogspam and content marketing. However I'm not sure I will stick with it a long time. I seems like it has mostly stalled and the team is getting distracted by making a browser, non-relevant AI (I have no problem with the few AI experiments tied to searching) and other side projects. We'll see. I really hope that they pull themselves together and focus or it might not last. But for now they seem like one of the better options available.

Bing's new "Deep Search" where it has some sort of LLM refinement iteration process has also been helpful sometimes. Probably the best AI search product I have seen, but definitely doesn't replace most searches for me.

Since you mentioned not knowing if this is the right community. For any question where you dont know where it goes !no_stupid_questions@programming.dev usually catches everything. Theres also some other question coms at !cs_career_questions@programming.dev and !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev but theyre more specific. I can leave this one here though, its fine (especially since theres a bunch of info here now)

startpage.com or duckduckgo.

Recently started using startpage and it seems pretty decent.

MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer

It currently supports the following languages/regions:

Dansk (Danmark)

Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)

English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)

Español (España/México)

Suomalainen (Suomi)

Français (Canada/France)

Italiano (Italia)

Nederlands (Nederland)

Polski (Polska)

Svenska (Sverige)

Source: https://metager.org/lang

There is a TOR-hidden service too:

https://metager.org/tor

It is open source:

https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer

And has other useful features, for example:

That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.

Source: https://metager.org/tips

Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:

https://searx.space

I'm avoiding the major search engines. If I really need a search engine, I use DuckDuckGo. Most of the time, search forms of a few websites provide better results. I've bookmarked search forms of e.g. wikipedia, Wiktionary, the python docs, Arch Linux wiki, github, dict.leo.org, bug trackers of software I commonly use (such as Mozilla's bug tracker) and so on. I'm basically using Firefox's "keyword" search feature in the way DuckDuckGo's !bang syntax works.