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?

  • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    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.

  • countrypunk@slrpnk.net
    5·
    12 hours ago

    Marginalia isn’t a daily driver search engine, but it specifically gets you obscure results. Pretty nifty side-engine to have.

  • Marthirial@lemmy.world
    11·
    19 hours ago

    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 removed sites like Reddit or Quora.

    • Syakaizin@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 hour ago

      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.

  • Ark-5@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    5·
    19 hours ago

    4get.ca lets you select your scraper among pretty much everything else listed here, and it can be themed with my preferred color scheme right out of the box, so it gets my vote.

    • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
        10·
        1 day ago

        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=%25s

        Long, disables AI answers and ads: https://duckduckgo.com/?kak=-1&kax=-1&kbe=0&k1=-1&q=%25s

        Steps 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=%s to the end, which acts as a placeholder for the browser to replace with your actual search query. Using my example https://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.
        • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4·
          23 hours ago

          Thanks for the tips but it says that it can be disabled right on the summary itself. The issue isn’t disabling it for me. It’s that the information is bad and I don’t want a search engine that thinks this is useful. Sorry for not making that more clear. That’s what I meant by me being fickle.

  • Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    36·
    1 day ago

    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:

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    Duckduckgo is the best one, you can also use Startpage andWoogle

    • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
      1·
      17 hours ago

      I’ve jumped around to pretty much all search engines (except kagi) and I’ve settled on and been using duckduckgo for the longest duration out of all the alternatives

      • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        17 hours ago

        Same I stopped using startpage after Google became horrible.

  • Tzeentch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    151·
    1 day ago

    This is probably the best resource for keeping track of which search engine options exist and what their quality is like: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes

    For a “fire and forget” option that doesnt require any configuration you cant go wrong with good ol DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/

    If you’re okay with dealing with more configuration and breakage then Searx can be pretty powerful as its a metasearch engine that can search with every search engine you tell it at once and agregate the results(while proxying things to maintain privacy): https://searx.space/ (had decent luck with the https://search.sapti.me/ instance if you just wanna try it out without searching through a list of options)

    Also all search engines are kinda bad due to SEO spam and “AI” generated images and articles polluting the results, consider using uBlacklist to help you filter out the trash from search results(think of it like ublock origin for search engine results), can use it for basically any search engine so no reason to not set it up: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

  • otterpop@lemmy.world
    91·
    1 day ago

    I’ve really been enjoying Kagi. They seem to have a pretty good privacy policy as well. However Searxng is probably the best for privacy since it’s self hosted.