What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?
Here’s my experience with some search engines:
A Tier – Gives me the closest results.
- Google: A classic and oftentimes, it gets what I want. A lot of the links are redirects which is annoying.
- Kagi: It’s paid but it has a lot of features like “lenses” and “quick answer”. The results are pretty good. It gives me good articles and PDFs instead of a blogspot post.
- You.com: The WORST UI EVER but the results are surprisingly decent. It’s pretty close to Kagi. It might actually be the same thing. It also has an AI chatbot but I don’t think it’s as good as Bing’s or OpenAI’s.
B Tier – Gives me decent results.
- Startpage:
It used to use Google search results but they switched to Bing. It is worse than Google.EDIT: Search results are still closer to Google but they “incorporate Microsoft Bing results”. From my experience, it filters out some of Google results that were very useful for me. Their widgets (particularly the Wikipedia one) sometimes displays irrelavant information. - DuckDuckGo: Results are worse than Google. One time a referral link came up in one of my searches.
- Bing: There’s no dark mode. The AI chat tool is pretty nice and is comparable to the OpenAI one (significantly better than Google’s Bard). Search results are worse than Google.
- Yandex: Search results are similar to DuckDuckGo.
- Ecosia: Search results are similar to the ones above.
C Tier – Gives me poor results.
- Brave: Search results feel so inconsistent and out of place. Maybe worse than the ones above.
- Mojeek: Independent search engine. Results aren’t very good.
Open Source Front Ends - Results quality varies.
- SearXNG: It depends on which instance you’re using. Sometimes search results error out due to rate limiting but you still get results anyway. It has a lot of options and configs so it fits to your liking so you can choose which search engines you want to include.
- LibreX: Actually one of my favorites since I’ve never encountered errors due to rate limiting but using it to search for images is terribly slow. It has a cool feature where you can add front ends like Libreddit and Wikiless. It also has a built-in torrent search engine.
- Whoogle: The UI isn’t very good and it performs poorly on most public instances. A smaller or private instance might be worth looking into. It uses Google search results.
F Tier – It sucks.
- Qwant: Not available in my country.
If anyone knows of any other search engine not in this list, let me know so I can try it out.
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For my job and work. I use Kagi. Its not free, but the search returns are very good, you can filter domains out from your returns, it supports custom “bangs” ala duck duck go and theres no tracking of queries. There are also specific filters for things like programming, or recipes for cooking etc. Theres also no ads, you are paying and are the customer. They are trying to establish a sustainable model to run on that allows for privacy.
I find it quite refreshing. It isnt free and I generally hate subscription stuff, but this is easily one I dont mind as it pays dividends often when searching for work.
Having to pay for a limited number of searches really takes away a lot of freedom. I would really have to think about my search query and be upset if it didn’t give me the results I was looking for. I would need unlimited searches just for my peace of mind. And I’m definitely not paying more then a couple of dollars for it. Might sound cheap but I really really hate subscription services.
Wow. I don’t mind paying for stuff if it’s good. But seriously $5/month seems pretty expensive, and you only get 300 searches. $25 for unlimited searches, which seems like an insane amount of money.
The problem here is so many people are used to tech running at a loss on the books and/subsiding operating costs by selling customer data and analytics.
The reality is running tech companies is hard and expensive. The money here goes straight back into development. It’s just out of beta since march, and they have increased their quotas since I have been a customer.
But people are spoiled by free where you aren’t a customer. You are the product. If you are cool with that it’s fine. This isn’t the product for you.
For me, I like the idea and the searches are better than DDG/bing and startpage/google. So it’s worth the cost personally. I would rather pay that than say…Amazon prime where I’m both the customer and the product.
I mean yes I agree with all your points. But I stand by the assertion that it’s too expensive. I could handle $5/month, perhaps, but 300 searches is waaaay too few. That’s 10 per day. I did 10 searches this morning before I got out of bed.
For unlimited searches it’s twice the cost of a streaming service. Yet it has negligible bandwidth costs, and significantly less storage cost, probably less development cost. Sure a small user base too, but at that price they’re really going to struggle to grow it!
It’s really just too expensive.
At $10 it’s 1000 unique searches. I search a ton and have it on my phone etc. haven’t exceeded the limit. I am at 600 searches right now, with a renewal due on the 24th.
They are writing a search engine from scratch. They don’t just randomize bing or google searches. So I think you may be underestimating the operating and especially development costs, probably hosting costs too.
But to each his own. Also those streaming services you mention. They don’t really turn a profit, and definitely don’t on subscriptions.
More and more I have been using the Bing “chat” search. It does a search, filters through the results and summarizes the answer with links to the sites it found them on.
For certain types of search it is a huge time saver of scrolling through results to find answers on various pages.
Over all bing search it self isn’t bad.
Dunno why you’re getting down voted. It’s literally a search engine that can read all the bullshit faster than you, so that you don’t have to.
If it isn’t open / free / private there is a % of the community that will not even try it.
Just like on Reddit lots of negative energy in some subs.
Hardly saying bing is amazing only that lately I have been drawn to trying it more since the chat based search that allows follow ups in natural language.
Google bards equivalent is only available in the US and just this last week the UK so I can’t try it out.
However over all I agree that more and more google search results have more adds and the good results pushed further and further down.
I don’t like the idea of getting answers from a search engine. That gives too much power to the company that runs the search engine. Id prefer to get a variety of links from independent sources.
Have it compile a list of sources it’s already sourced from, and keep searching for any new sources it can add. Have it list its expectations for what an expert should know about a particular subject, then have it learn about each of those points, and finally present as if it is an expert there to assist you.
