I used google for most of my life, for the past couple months I’ve been using brave search, but I still end up using google often because google images is far better than brave search images. I’m also worried that maybe brave search isn’t the best choice. What would you guys recommend?
I am paying for Kagi. Has worked well and some searched topics had been human curated so the answers are right there in the results. But it also does a good job with obscure searches, although it seems it tries to alter the meaning or context in order to show more results.
Best feature is the ability to hide from the results shit sites like Reddit or Quora.
Same - I paid last year and it just expired, so I tried Brave Search, DDG and Startpage but they weren’t cutting it for me so I’ve just gone back to Kagi.
Find a variant of Searx you like.
I use DDG but I’m always open to alternatives.
I use duckduckgo. It is Bing but with more privacy. You could try also searx, swisscows, startpage or qwant
I’ve been using DDG for a while but just got hit with an AI summary finally, like Brave and then Google does. It’s such a turn off. I trust the information exactly 0%. Definitely considering just using SearXNG full time now. I liked DDG a lot but I’m so fickle, it doesn’t take much for me to swap.
You can disable that. Here are two links that disable that. Add it to Firefox or Chromium through the settings.
Simple, only disables AI answers:
https://duckduckgo.com/?kbe=0&q=%25sLong, disables AI answers and ads:
https://duckduckgo.com/?kak=-1&kax=-1&kbe=0&k1=-1&q=%25sSteps to create a custom DDG search config:
- Visit: https://duckduckgo.com/settings
- Select the settings you want, for example dark mode.
- Click the “Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data” button.
- Copy the link, using my dark mode scenario would yield the URL
https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d - Edit the URL by adding
&q=%sto the end, which acts as a placeholder for the browser to replace with your actual search query. Using my examplehttps://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&q=%25s - Last step is add it to your browser. May differ between browsers, but generally look in the search engines tab of the settings.
does ddg not have its own search backend anymore?
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
My reading is that the classic search listings are coming from Bing and the the quick answer type stuff is coming from DDGs systems.
the the quick answer type stuff is coming from DDGs systems.
which doesn’t an index make, more like a fetcher for specific data
nope, it was yandex + bing, now bing: https://www.searchenginemap.com/
SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng
It enhances and respects privacy,
is open source and self hostable,
and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, …)You can find a list of public hosted instances here:
https://searx.space/However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.
For this I use:
- On Desktop - GimmeASearX:
https://github.com/demostanis/gimmeasearx - On the go - SearX NeoCities:
https://searx.neocities.org/
- On Desktop - GimmeASearX:
All of them at once: SearXNG.
It aggregates results from whichever you select.
I’ve been using Ecosia, it’s basically Google results, but with more privacy, and they invest the revenue in tree-planting projects.
*or Bing depending upon where you are
I have used brave search which was really good I really liked the ai search although i moved away from it after seeing how bad google ai search was (saying things like its a good idea to eat rocks due to not being able to recognise satire) and I managed to get brave to do the same thing with a different onion article so i dont really trust any ai search now. At the moment I use searx it’s incredibly private especially if you are willing to self host (I am not) and you have so much customisation you can use any search index so you don’t have to worry about bad results.
Qwant also seams really good although I haven’t tried it, same with ecosia especially if you like planting trees although I use an ad blocker so that doesn’t work for me.
Imo there are so many great free browsers it’s not really worth paying for a browser.
I also don’t recommend duck duck since it used to have a tracking deal with Microsoft. It doesn’t have it anymore but I think it’s enough to lose faith in it.
qwant and ecosia are both using bing, with the latter using google sometimes: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ map needs updating for that latter point
I don’t really see why this is relevant unless google or bing results are bad (and from my experience they are pretty good) since privacy focused search angines anonymize all search engine requests so you can’t be tracked by google or bing. Also that map really is outdated brave uses it’s own indexing now so it no longer relies on google.
Marginalia isn’t a daily driver search engine, but it specifically gets you obscure results. Pretty nifty side-engine to have.
I use and recommend Qwant or DuckDuckGo
I self host my own SearXNG instance. I use that.
Me too! Surprisingly easy to set up from docker. Like, four commands?
Including setting up docker?
Setting up docker to host a couple of containers from Linux is only a couple of commands, depending on your distro. Basically, install a few packages, create a group for docker, add yourself to that group.
Harder in Windows, probably, but I’ve never tried it.
I’ll look into it (linux). Thanks!
Anyone of the many SearXNG instances is your best choice for balancing privacy and quality results. It’s open source, sources multiple search engines which you can control, is anonymous, and provides solid results. Here’s a list of active SearXNG instances: https://searx.space/
I use Brave Search (yeah from the browser) and it works pretty good. Their privacy policy seems fairly robust at least according to my understanding and they have their own index, so they don’t rely on Google or Bing, which allows them to filter out the SEO Spam rampant on other engines.
Been using Qwant for the last 2-3 months and been pretty happy with the results
I also use DuckDuckGo. If I find I’m not seeing the results I want i just add !g anywhere and the search gets sent over to Google, though I don’t find I need to do that very often.
