It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.
Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.
- Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
- Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
- Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
- Yandex: https://yandex.com/
If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?
EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.
Here are some options I use in my rotation.
Brave Search (skip the browser)
Mojeek
Qwant (French)
Yandex (Russian)
Mullvad Leta (Mullvad VPN subscription required)
MetaGer (German meta search)
Startpage (Private Google results)
DuckDuckGo (Private Bing results)
SearXNG and similar self hosted options are awesome, but I’ve found them unreliable.
Be skeptical of Kagi… It’s promoted pretty heavily around here for something that’s not FOSS.
I’m convinced at this point that Kagi is astroturfing on Lemmy, it’s unnatural. All they do is just cite the marketing page when questioned about the quality, or as to why they supposedly think it’s worth paying for compared to much more mature as-driven services that do respect your privacy.
I’ve been using Kagi for 3 months now I think? And I’ve found it to be extremely useful for research…to a point, my only real issue is that after the first or so series of results it either doesn’t offer anything further or just no longer is showing relevant results to my search. Honestly though I’ve been very happy with Kagi and continue to pay the 10/month but if I do find something even better I’d happily switch. I’m not married to any particular search engine (well …least not to the extent of using Google services).
If you’re skeptical just give it a try I think they have a trial system in place.
THANK YOU for mentioning startpage! I have not heard of them but I haven’t liked using DDG very much so I’ve begrudgingly using google in private mode (and then I always forget to switch back and forth)
Took wayyy to long to find something not recommending Kagi.