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.

  • Alavi@programming.dev
    1·
    1 hour ago

    I’m a software engineer so I search quite a lot.

    99% of my search is on duckduckgo and it provides me the best answers. Even if I’m using someone else’s device to show them something for example, and their default search engine is google, I will switch to ddg because it genuinely provides better answers.

  • 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

    • myszka@lemmy.ml
      3·
      6 hours ago

      I hate that it sounds the same as Italian “caghi” meaning “you shit”

  • ShutUpWesley@piefed.zipEnglish
    7·
    8 hours ago

    DDG is my goto, I always have a SearXNG instance, but it’s relatively slow and runs into problems too frequently to be my goto

  • uuj8za@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    8 hours ago

    I use Kagi for personal devices. I wish there was an open source alternative, but there’s not. So I’m stuck.

    For work or other devices, I use Qwant.

  • stellargmite@lemmy.world
    22·
    13 hours ago

    Kagi. Not cheap but I seriously cant go back. Its really good for what I need - actual results at the top of the first page, based purely on what I searched for. What a concept. My needs are basic to be clear.

  • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    10 hours ago

    Yandex for reverse image search or piracy content

    The noai DDG for everything else.

    Unfortunately I have notice for the last couple of months that some simple things I can’t just find the answer and the shit AI suggestion baked in the google search is giving me better results and I don’t think that is the AI that got better.

    • Ghoelian@piefed.socialEnglish
      9·
      8 hours ago

      Same here. It’s great easily being able to block those shitty github/stackoverflow scrapers like codegrepper, answeroverflow etc.

    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      6·
      6 hours ago

      and you can downrank/ban websites.

      Holy shit, I’ve been wanting that for years. I’ll have to check them out.

      Edit: Aaaand they have a built in AI despite calling themselves “human-focussed”. That’s a turnoff. If I’m paying for a search engine, I’d prefer to have a subscription option with the AI stripped out so I’m not subsidizing it for others.

      Plus, I’m thinking about it I’m not exactly on board with needing an account with a search engine. That makes it super easy to track you. Meanwhile, using noai.duckduckgo anonymously via a VPN is way more private

      • graynk@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        3 hours ago

        I’m not exactly on board with needing an account with a search engine. That makes it super easy to track you.

        https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

        they have a built in AI despite calling themselves “human-focussed”

        Because it’s a tool that can serve humans. Not strictly search-related, but their AI-based translation tool is genuinely great and very useful to me.

        https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html

        You don’t have to use built-in AI, it only triggers when you explicitly ask for it and you can completely disable it in the settings.

        They also have anti-slop filters, BTW: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

        Finally, not sure what models the search summarizer and the translation tool use, but the assistant lets you use open weights model like Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek et al.

      • ApplyingAutomation@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 hours ago

        In my experience, Kagi doesn’t force AI down your throat. It only triggers an AI summary if you end your query with a “?”, and it does seem to be summarization of the search results.

        Also, as per Kagi’s pricing page, there is a higher tier for people who want more AI features as you are suggesting.

        All that being said, I use a Searxng instance 😅

  • kuiskaaja@lemmy.ml
    2·
    8 hours ago

    qwant for basically everything, tineye for reverse image search and google for that 1 out of 100 searches that i cant get an adequate qwant search of

  • eremophila@lemmy.zip
    12·
    13 hours ago

    I switched to noai.duckduckgo when startpage went ai. It is a lot better than when I tried duckduckgo in previous years, and definitely better than startpage was. I haven’t noticed any issues with search returns.