What search engine do you use?
from firelizzard@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 20 May 2024 00:55
https://programming.dev/post/14323544
from firelizzard@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 20 May 2024 00:55
https://programming.dev/post/14323544
Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn’t see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?
threaded - newest
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??).
I’m just annoyed by the regions issues, you’ll get pretty biased results depending in what region you select.
If you try to search for something specific to a region with other selected you’ll find sometime empty results, which shows you won’t get relevant results about a search if you don’t properly select the region.
Probably this is more obvious with non technical searches, for example my default region is canada-en and if I try “instituto nacional electoral” I only get a wiki page, an international site and some other random sites with no news, only when I change the region I get the official page ine.mx and news. For me this means kagi hides results from other regions instead of just boosting the selected region’s ones.
Yeah that drives me nuts too. Shopping results for fuckin Home Depot? I’m in Europe you stupid search engine
And searching for a german word always brings up dictionaries from german to english, instead of Wikipedia etc.
I’m using kagi as well and have been very pleased with it.
Their scumbag CEO really soured kagi for me
Explain? I haven’t heard anything negative
Excellent write up on it
I am not affiliated with the writer in any way.
This is one person rambling about stuff she’s hypothesising
“They didn’t pay sales tax for the first couple of years”
Do you even know how small businesses get off the ground in Europe? Possibly by being exempt from taxes until their profits are high enough?
Says their financial information is impossible to find, then starts telling us exactly what that information is
This is the same as people watching a YouTube channel and just assuming it’s gospel because they watch that channel a lot smh
It’s enough to put a bad taste in my mouth, it ended up on HN if you want to read some more critical commentary (of kagi and of the blogger)
What I read was a measured and reasoned reply from one of the founders to a small handful of keyboard warriors 😂
I don’t get why “scumbag”.
The blogger shitted on his company, and refuse to hear any explanation from the CEO, if anything, I find him very patient.
I read that when it was originally posted and it just comes across as a one-sided account from someone pissed about something, with no actual thought about the situation put into it.
Searxng.
Perplexity
I switch back and forth between DDG and Perplexity. When I quickly want to look something up I find Perplexity quite helpful, just get the answer without filtering through search results.
Ddg. It’s shit but it’s okay for my purposes most of the time.
DuckDuckGo
Does anyone care to explain the possible reason for downvoting this - is there something I am not aware of wrt DDG?
It’s based on Bing from what I recall, and it’s not necessarily the most accurate engine. I tried it for a few months and couldn’t replace Google with it unfortunately.
Thank you for explaining! And now I am getting downvoted for asking an honest question, so that I can learn more, sheesh. Ignoring the fact for the moment that the Fediverse is becoming more Reddi-fied all the time… I appreciate you actually taking the time to answer.
I actually swap back and forth between Google and DDG. For things like local business hours, Image search and Maps, the former finds the better results. For a few things (that it may consider piracy?), Google refuses to find results even on page 10. For most other things, while the SEOs may not have entirely taken over, they at least have risen to an extremely annoying prominence.
e.g. try searching for the word “inspire”, and rather than offer you the dictionary definition, the top hit (for me right now) is the “Inspire” sleep apnea innovation - which nowhere is labelled as an advertisement:-(. I understand that the latter company would like to subvert the normal rules of politeness & etiquette and replace my prioritization so that their name appears at the very tippy-top of the search (possibly locally, or perhaps even world-wide?), but that doesn’t mean that that is what *I* wanted. Which is why more & more often these days I go to DDG first and then Google, rather than the other way around which is what I did until very recently.
But yeah, sometimes I do legit use Google search too.
Welcome to programming.dev! 😂I’ve had the same happen (technical issue, looking for a solution or workaround, get downvoted). I take it as “I’m not interested in this - don’t ever show me anything about this again” - well, just scroll on by then, not hard. 🙄
‘Honest inquiries are not desired here’, or like ‘You should have researched it yourself first’ or some such. Also do not make the mistake of expressing a personal preference for anything other than using Arch Linux btw:-P.
I can’t even recall the last time I downvoted something. It’s measured in weeks rather than hours though. On the one hand: to each their own, but on the other, people are so short-sighted they don’t see how that acts to stifle conversations - like a personal preference is just that, personal, and for something like this OP, a disagreement expressed via text comment can explain something, and we all (people receiving & offering it & bystanders) can learn from it, whereas a downvote can’t even be traced to who offered it atm (except on Kbin). So it’s frustrating to have to guess - like is DDG really a bad search engine? Then say that!? And how is it bad? Explanations add to the conversation, while downvoting just seems so… lazy.
I’ve downvoted things which I know are wrong (people love expressing opinions on things they have no expertise on - just check out the threads on order of operations! 😂), and upvote correct things (the whole point to up/downvote is to push relevant things to the top), otherwise neither usually. Sometimes I use upvote to indicate I liked something someone said.
Yep.
It’s true that down-voting is a form of information, in some contexts. I could even say “Who wants tacos today? Up-vote if yes, down-vote if no”, and it could be fully friendly. It is just that here, in this situation, I didn’t get it.
Ofc it’s this huge tangent from the OP b/c originally there was just a single down-vote, and I was curious if I were missing something wrt DDG, but it sounds like not, just “sometimes people prefer to use Google”. Which sounds like it would apply to every non-Google suggestion though?
And then my asking that meta-question quadrupled the number of down-votes - probably like you said, people consider this tangent not relevant to the OP - but at least as a result of it all I know I am not missing anything important… that anyone is willing to write out:-D. Which seems important, crucial even, info for OP and others to have? About the down-sides to DDG I mean.
But look how many words and messages we had to use and even number of respondents had to participate just to dig out that truth. Even a comment like “you suck, nerd!” - aside from its unfriendliness & irrelevance to the discussion - does act to disambiguate the reasoning behind a down-vote, whereas simply down-voting with no explanation sends a confusing signal with no clear interpretation (except perhaps in the mind of the sender).
This is why I may pile on the downvotes, to signal agreement, but if I am the first to take that initiative, I do at least take the time to reply so they aren’t left wondering why.
Remember the human, and all of that:-).
I scrolled back to see, and I think that initial one was just someone who disagreed with your suggestion, for whatever reason (like I downvote incorrect responses to order of operations questions. i.e. hearsay which contradicts what’s actually in textbooks and taught), but then yeah, there was some piling on when you asked for an explanation, and I just write them off as “I don’t want to see this” types. At first it bothered me, but in the end I just take out of it that I got more upvotes than downvotes, so just proceed with business as usual then. :-)
Yeah, there’s some keyboard-warriors who forget that. You learn to just ignore the downvoters unless, like in your situation, you’d like an explanation as to why your particular suggestion was downvoted by someone. e.g. maybe they know something that you don’t. There was a whole side-discussion about Kagi like that (someone had seen something on a blog, and someone else pointed out the CEO’s response to the blog, etc. - I didn’t read the whole thing… but I didn’t downvote it either ;-) ).
Yeah, it seems much more sane merely to scroll down, in the normal use-case, except as you said when there is something else going on or a more extreme reaction is warranted like why are you advocating for genocide in a post discussing what search engine alternatives exist (which fortunately did not happen here, but occasionally such events do pop up…:-P).
Oh look i found a video of today’s event.
<img alt="img" src="https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/675/806/91a.gif">
I agree, unfortunately. The only reason I stick with ddg over Google is because, unlike Google, they don’t smother me with captchas the moment I enter a VPN.
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.
Pro tip: if you add !g to your search results in DuckDuckGo, it returns Google results
Yeah that’s what I usually do
Same. I have had particularly poor results on image searches from duckduckgo. It’s on par or superior to Google for general web searches, but man, Google image search is still better
I feel like I see this question come up now and then across the communities I’m in, and there’s always a debate over search engines lol. Anyway, to answer the question, I use Kagi for its custom rankings (and, more recently, Wolfram|Alpha integration, which I’ve found more useful than I expected it to be).
Because Google has gone to shit and everyone’s desparate for a replacement.
None, I find it myself.
I’m genuinely curious about this. Do you just stick to sites you know? Do you randomly try web addresses when you’re looking for something new?
I was joking.
I wasn’t sure, because I’m sure there is someone out there doing that
amateur. I just manifest the correct IP address for my desired resource and fetch it with curl
startpage.com or duckduckgo.
Recently started using startpage and it seems pretty decent.
You.com was pretty good for highly technical topics, otherwise Google
Edit: use a VPN from the EU for Google, you’ll get better search results
Searxng
.
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.
The first result on Kagi search is this list which shows the movie years in parentheses so you can easily skip through just the ones from the 1980s. The other search results are more about the gag itself - first use of it by Charlie Chaplin, etc.
DDG results weren’t too bad, although repetitious and focused on the history of the gag, and not particular examples.
Per Brave:
To add, second result in Brave:
www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=slipping-on…
Kagi:
Quick Answer
Based on the available information, the “slipping on a banana peel” gag has been a staple of comedy films since the early 20th century. The first known appearance of this gag on the big screen was in the Charlie Chaplin movie “By the Sea”, where Chaplin’s character “The Tramp” tosses a banana peel on the ground and then slips on it later. [1][2]
The banana peel gag was soon adopted by other silent film stars like Buster Keaton, who featured it in his 1928 film “The Cameraman”. [3] The gag continued to be used in comedy films throughout the 20th century, including in the 1926 Harold Lloyd film “For Heaven’s Sake”. [4]
However, the available information does not mention any specific 1980s comedy movies that featured the banana peel gag. The gag seems to have been more prevalent in the silent film era and earlier decades of the 20th century. [1][5]
Kagi. I like it
I just started using this and am still in the trial period but I will definitely be paying for it when my 100 free searches are gone. So many top results are exactly what I’m looking for. I can’t believe my expectations have been conditioned to the point where this surprises me…
Yea it hasn’t disappointed me so far, I’m also still in the trial, been waiting for a search that turns crap results on G and DDG to try and put it through the paces. Though compared to G it is nice not having half the results be sponsored.
I’ve heard enough bad things about it to stay well away. Which is too bad bc it’s quite good atm! I just expect it to hoover up my data & get enshittified sooner than later & the CEO is Musk-level BSer 🤷♂️👍
What have you heard and where? I’ve not seen anything that indicates either of those things
I don’t know about beefbot, but this blog convinced me to not use kagi:
Why I Lost Faith in Kagi
Oh really? I never felt like that was convincing in any way especially since lot of the stuff in that blog is just uninformed (for example you don’t have to pay taxes in many jurisdictions until you hit a certain threshold)
I’m not gonna try to convince you to use Kagi, but I just don’t feel like that blog is full of good reasons not to.
Correct, it was that blog And “Slimy_4og” you sound like one of the many disinformation AI bots farting around now
“You disagree with me so therefore you’re an AI bot” sure is a take…
Well, it’s plausible you’ve ingested enough influence from enough propaganda sources that you yourself believe what they’ve told you, & you parrot it back out, which sorta makes you, in the limited context of one comment, functionally indistinguishable from a propaganda worker, who probably has been replaced by an AI bot bc those can do more of that work.
So ya can’t really blame me for the shorthand of just referring to you as one, yknow?
What the hell are you talking about?
I had someone say that to me, a Maths teacher, when I was trying to tell them where they were going wrong with their Maths! 😂And they were a programmer - no wonder all the e-calcs are wrong… (sigh)
Phind.com is pretty good for programming stuff, it’s AI but it cites it’s sources.
I’m mainly using duckduckgo for 7 years now. If I can’t find something with it, I try startpage, which sometimes helps.
Google. I usually find what I want with it, although it has gotten worse over time.
I tried DDG a few years ago and only found it worse. Like, there was a clear performance impact with me using DDG vs me using Google.
Same. Once every few months I give DDG another try for a week or two, but between their strictly inferior and more spam riddled results and the absolutely grotesquely bad Apple Maps they integrate, it’s back to Google pretty quickly.
It’s like that study found out: Yeah, Google results have objectively gotten worse. But so have Bing’s and by extension DDG’s, and more so than Google’s.
You can use !maps query to workaround that. I typically end up using DDG as a frontend to other sites through its bangs syntax.
E.g.
But yeah, if normal DDG results don’t work for you it’s probably not a huge gain.
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.
Somehow I’ve never heard of searxng before. Would you say it’s better than DDG? Are the memory requirements not too high?
Searxng is a search engine aggregator. It sends your search out to all the engines and aggregates the results. No ads, no bullshit, endlessly customizable.
You can use one of the public instances. You don’t have to run your own.
searx.space
I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.
DuckDuckGo
I used to have to put !g (redirect to Google) on like half my searches to get the results I wanted. These days, I actually generally prefer DDG’s results over Google’s.
Same, especially on image searches… but Google’s quality has plummeted to a point Bing is better… how the mighty has fallen.
Many tests have proven that Bing is the best search engine for porn. They know their target audience.
I use this on my phone. It’s gotten pretty great!
I use DDG too. When I redirect to google using !g it’s usually out of desperation and it gives me the same bad results in a slightly different order.
Yesterdsy I stumbled over this: www.mojeek.com Apparently has its own index.
this is correct 😀
Mama, look at me. I’m talking to a .com-owner!!
You are awesome for providing an alternative. Would you mind letting me know what’s the average monthly cost running your infrastructure and if you are paying it as individuals ?
I use my own self hosted SearXNG.
Why the -ng-?
It’s a better fork of SearX
Also SearX is no longer maintained github.com/…/276ffd3f01cdd823f75676c51231fad40400…
Same, it’s super simple with Docker and you don’t even need to fiddle with ports or anything. I should probably try running it at my work PC now that I think of it… Anyway, duckduckgo has been good to me for all these years.
How much ram does the container use on average?
Around 100 megas, iirc. Try it out!
I run a “public” instance with basic auth so I can use it from anywhere (phone, work). I’ve made my instance my default search engine everywhere. (I know basic auth is not the most secure but I wouldn’t even really care it other people used my instance; I just don’t want it hammered.)
Anyone have any experience with Swisscows?
Source: 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: metager.org/lang
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
metager.org/tor
It is open source:
gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And has other useful features, for example:
Source: metager.org/tips
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
searx.space
Kagi
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)
Kagi.
I know, I know… I just really like it.
Really? I tried the trial and didn’t find it that much better than DDG… Specially not $10 a month for life better
I found it slightly better. I also find the entire user experience appealing, so that adds some points. I use web search dozens of times a day for work, so it’s worth it for me.
I probably would go back to 100% DDG if I stop working in tech.
I personally find it much better than DDG, and only a slight improvement over Brave. DDG’s reliance on Bing leaves me !banging my way out almost half the time.
Maybe I should check it out again
Brave
I used to use Duck Duck Go, but it’s supposedly not as private as it claims to be, and my understanding is Brave is a bit better there.
I don’t use the Brave browser tho, just the search engine
Ecosia. These days it’s better than Google.
Which isn’t better than Google these days? They dropped immensly in quality.
If you mean for programming specifically, I… don’t, really. At most it would be for a quick sanity check on syntax in a language I don’t write often, for which Google is fine. But otherwise I rely on documentation and search features of the various language/tool-specific websites.
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.
I used DuckDuckGo a couple of years ago, but they added their own blacklist of sites (pretty stupid), and for my language it started returning crappy generated spam sites instead of relevant results. They shouted at the top of their lungs that for my language they simply index the results from Yandex, but this is a lie, they are different.
StartPage gave the best results, but they introduced a captcha that I got every damn request.
I’m currently using SearXNG, which collects results from Google. And these are damn normal results, unlike other search engines that consider themselves the smartest and edit the results.
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.
Presearch, Perplexity, and occasionally DDG.
Qwant
I’ve been using Qwant as well and it’s actually really refreshing. No nonsense and I feel like I get better results than Kagi and Google and Bing.
I love it so far.
There are some times when Qwant returns bad results where I’ll revert to Google. Just to find worse results…
Jokes aside, Qeant handles most queries well, even local stuff in my native language.
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.
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.
Shameless self promo: I was upset by this as well so I’m working now on a curated search engine just for anything related to webdev. It focuses on blogs and docs. No BS, just high quality sources.
kukei.eu
Also it’s hosted on a PC in my living room ;)
Not perfect:
But here are some ideas.
More ideal ideas:
other stuff:
What am i actually using at this point? (Nothing is set up currently!).
*this isnt perfect! but i think overall i think i dont spend much time traveling to websites for info.
Historically:
Future:
There is certainly room for immediate improvement here.
Im just lazy.
I dont need the internet as much as the internet needs me.