Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn’t a clear solution to navigating the web because it’s either ai slop or the results are poor.

And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you’re looking for.

And so I told them I’d compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.

So far I have:

Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.

Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik

Ecosia: works great but relies on bing

I have tried things like qwant ect but haven’t really settled on those.

Any other suggestions?

I’d tell em to use udm14 but it’s still google so I’d rather keep that as a plan B.

  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone
    3·
    5 hours ago

    Well, at risk of downvotes…

    I know what your asking but tbh I generally don’t search, at least not like we used to. It’s weird to say that, like I’m making some claim to heightened purity or some bullshit but it’s not that at all. Search is just … noisy AF these days.

    I actually find myself using fewer sources, more directly and own my terms.

    Eg: For something like PubMed, I go to pubmed (or define a proper boolean PICO search in an indexing tool). Sci-hub is a good source too.

    https://sci-hub.st/

    Or I can hit the wikipedia API (or even better, self hosted kiwix) and find what I need.

    https://kiwix.org/en/

    Or, for known, commonly visited sites (like fan wikis), I use self-written tools.

    There are plenty of sites have public facing, nicely formatted, JSON friendly results. Others are just clean to scrape. A recent discovery was Muvitimes (for getting movie times listings).

    https://muvitimes.com/

    These tools query my white listed sites to a particular depth, collect the results I need, and present them for review.

    You can then cache the info locally to query against using something like Meilisearch.

    https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch

    There are other options too. Something like Scrapy can collect structured data and a Trafilatura-like extractor can remove menus, adverts, and repeated page content.

    https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy

    I’ve even use something like self hosted Perplexica. It can query SearXNG, Tavily, Exa or other sources.

    https://github.com/kiranz/perplexica

    Honestly, if it’s a quick throw away search, I’ll call my self hosted llm, get it to pull from Tavilly and give me the summary and citations. That’s been miles better than most other options for me but YMMV.

    Finally, if you’re talking about random occasional searches on phone, when I can’t access my LAN, I don’t mind DDG-lite

    https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite