• Nankeru@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).

    Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.

    And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.

    Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.

    And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.

    Lastly, I created a so-called “Lens”, which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
    Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I’ve defined - see image.

    Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.

    (copied from another thread I replied to)

    • ppp@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Interesting. I just searched some topics related to a paper I’m working on and found some good resources which I haven’t seen on Google yet. Really interesting.

    • metaeaux@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      +1 I’ve been using Kagi for almost a year now, and it’s so good! Well worth the cost of the subscription.

    • metaeaux@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Also, TIL about URL rewrites! Now all of my search results use private frontends. Thanks for the tip!

  • Evkob@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I use DuckDuckGo, I forgot how to live without the search tags such as !yt, !fb, !w to search specific sites.

  • sneakyninjapants
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    1 year ago

    Duck-Duck-Go. Getting worse for privacy (allegedly) but it’s been overall great for me. If I can’t find what I’m searching for on the first page or two I just add a !g to the front to search an anonymized google for that query.

  • Haunting_Tale_5150@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    My top ones:

    DuckDuckGo - may not be as private as they claim, but has been my go-to for years. Simple, but feature-full and still mostly decent for search.

    Marginalia - a search engine that favors text heavy websites, perfect for research

    Searx instance - not my main due to how spotty the instances can be and lazy to set up mine. But can basically grab stuff from all the “big” search engines, which saves a lot of time. I don’t consider it a godsend like most people do, though. As since big engines can give poor results.

    frogfind - a duckduckgo interface meant for older computers that converts webpages to basic html. Perfect for news articles and tutorials where you want to skip the “fluff”.

  • ajimix@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Kagi.com no ads, private, you pay a subscription so they look for your interest instead of you being the product, has many customizations, very responsive company, very good use of AI, super fast, doesn’t require javascript, and many other things, just give it a try

    • Jomn@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      What paid plan do you use ? If it’s not the ultimate plan, do you often go over the “limit” ? I’m interested, but I have a hard time knowing what plan I will actually require.

      • boopeditandnow
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        1 year ago

        Not OP, but as a data point, I do approximately 2000-2500 searches per month. I’m obviously on the unlimited plan (an early adopter version of it). I’m in software development so I search a lot.

      • ajimix@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I’m also on the early adopter unlimited plan. What I suggest is that you take a conservative plan and observe your behavior, you can always upgrade to a bigger plan later

  • Clairvoidance@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    might not count, but I use startpage, which uses google while allegedly keeping none of the info that makes google problematic
    sometimes i use duckduckgo,

    in firefox you can make a shortcut to type anything in any searchbar too, like so: (in this example I’ll use kbin.social search)

    We type something into search to get the exact url we need, that ends up being https://kbin.social/search?q=[something]
    in this case [something] is obviously what we typed, so we save a bookmark of https://kbin.social/search?q=%s where %s swaps out what we type when we call to the bookmark
    Then we give the bookmark a keyword that makes it easy to type, it can be anything but I’ll just use kb
    now whenever i type ‘kb somethingsomething’ it will search somethingsomething on kbin.social

    I use this for youtube, arch wiki, the type-effectiveness graph on bulbapedia pages ( https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/%s_(Pok%C3%A9mon)#Type_effectiveness ), etc, etc

  • Cola7608@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    paulgo.io. (searxng). A privacy-respecting, open metasearch engine. It also lists the location from where the results are pulled from, (i.e. Google, Bing, etc.)

    • Emi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I use a searxng instance as-well, one I can host myself. Besides the cool factor of hosting your own personal search engine you can tweak the setting a on a server level as you wish and you know the machine your queries are going to.

      • Emi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        When I want to try something AI related I use the Bing AI though, it can pull from multiple search results when giving an answer which is cool.

  • Jyrdano@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I have switched to Ecosia few days ago. No conplains so far. Its free, and builds off Bing IIRC.

    I have been intrigued by Kagi, but Im not really ready to pay a sub for a search engine.

  • Einar@lemmy.mlOP
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    1 year ago

    For general purposes I use Ecosia.

    For a while I used Swisscows almost exclusively. They do an excellent job with privacy.

    Due to a job I had, I moved away from it as I needed extremely specific information. As I write this, I’m thinking of giving it another try.

  • HidingCat@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Unfortunately, still Google, with Bing a distant second. I’ve realised at least half of my searches are locale-specific, and engines like DDG are so American-centric. This is even with letting DDG use accurate location data. Reading the options here and hoping to find something I’ve not heard before that’ll work and hopefully replace Google as my main search engine.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      If you are in Europe, Qwant is a decent alternative. There are also alternatives like Ecosia and Startpage that use Google or Bing behind the scenes but limit how much they can track you.

      • HidingCat@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Not in Europe, so don’t think that’ll work. Probably have to use something like what you said.

  • Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I use DuckDuckGo and it workw quite well and at least they say they protect your privacy (I am sure they do a better job than GAFAM/BigTech spyware mafia), but am looking for something better since I found out it has some agreement with Microsoft and I do not trust those spyware-producing convicted monopoly abusers at all.

  • Otome-chan@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I use you.com as it’s centered on an ai chatbot and pulls in traditional web search results to augment it’s answers. it works quite well.