Google’s results have been getting worse over time, but it seems like the last couple years, they’ve taken a steep nose-dive, completely overrun with crappy content farming.
I’ve mitigated a lot of that by doing searches for any kind of product comparison or technical question with “site:reddit.com”, but now with the possibility that that trick will become less useful over time as well…?
Yeah. What search engines are other tech folks using?
SearXNG has come a long way. I self-host, and I consistently get more reliable results than when I use Google, and you can set it to replace something like twitter.com with nitter.net or reddit.com with teddit.net, so you can still visit those sites automatically on mobile (not sure, but that might be a self-host only thing).
Thank you for this! Never heard of SearXNG until this thread. Sounds promising if you can use these replacement sites.
Thanks for the tip! Just set up my docker container. How do you configure the hostname replacements? In the UI Preferences menu, there’s just a toggle switch for “Hostname Replace”, but nowhere to input a list of names.
Not sure if you can see this since beehaw defederated us, but just add/edit the following in your settings.yml file in the searxng folder. The following redirects only reddit & twitter:
enabled_plugins: - 'Hostname replace' hostname_replace: # '(.*\.)?youtube\.com$': 'invidious.example.com' # '(.*\.)?youtu\.be$': 'invidious.example.com' # '(.*\.)?youtube-noocookie\.com$': 'yotter.example.com' '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$': 'teddit.net' '(.*\.)?redd\.it$': 'teddit.net' '(www\.)?twitter\.com$': 'nitter.net' # # to remove matching host names from result list, set value to false # 'spam\.example\.com': false '(.*\.)?pinterest\.com': false '(.*\.)?instagram\.com': false