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.

I pay for Kagi. The results are good oob and you can downrank/ban websites.

Duckduckgo for everything.

At first, after the switch years ago, I'd occasionally fallback to Google to search for solutions or explanations of technical errors but I guess Duckduckgo got better and/or Google got worse and I no longer use any other.

A few days ago I tried Qwant briefly with the idea to try to change to non-US services, don't remember what for, and was not satisfied with the results. I did not try it for long enough to say it's not a good choice though.

noai duckduck go

I selfhost searxng ¯\(ツ)/¯

I use qwant mostly

I'm not a tech person. I use duck duck go or i use Google through ten blue links to remove the AI results.

I totally would but I have yet to find the time to invest on self hosting stuff in general.

DDG for everything but especially searches in other countries (using the country toggle).

Google for images and super localized results.

Yandex for reverse image search (yes really).

Selfhosted SearXNG or ddg noai / startpage when i get rate limited

Ecosia

Works very well for everyday stuff, been using it for almost 2 years now, though it does take a bit to get used to it because it gives you slightly different results for the same search queries

It's not worse, it just interprets your queries slightly differently

The only time it consistently fails and I switch to google is when I need to look up something via popular references, typically text on memes, for which Ecosia instead tends to return serious/factual results instead of the funny I was looking for

Self hosting searxng: https://docs.searxng.org/ I use it for everything. It finds results from multiple search engines, and lists every engine name at the bottom of each link to see where this "recommendation" comes from. You can configure which "engines" it should search. So I use it as my default for everything. The results aren't always the best and there are times when I then open other search engines directly to see if its any better. But admitteley it is only hosted on my main PC. Currently I cannot access it from other computers, but that is something I plan todo in the future.

If you use Archlinux, then its quite easy as there is a package that always builds from source. Look at my instructions here: https://lemmy.ml/post/45955322

If self hosting isn't your thing, then you can just use an instance from someone else who made it available in the public: https://searx.space/ It's also a good way to see how it works before committing to self hosting, if you plan to.

I wish Ecosia started rolling out EUSP in more countries, currently it's only available in France.

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.

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.

Oh, I actually like that Ecosia gives serious/factual results, less meme or brainrot stuff.

I love how it allows me to move domains up or down. This allows me to have wikipedia results at the very top and have all X, FB, MS domains blocked from appearing in the results.

Someone posted this neosearch thing recently that I've enjoyed :

https://neosearch.org/

TIL thanks

Kagi. Once you try it you'll never go back.

I use duckduckgo because I'm basic.

I use Qwant as my daily mostly because it's European and I can turn of AI.

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.

Same but the one without the hallucinating "assistant."

I still use udm14. I've got most of the searches listed installed in my firefox and I jump between them a lot.

I never understood the hype about it. I tried it for a while then my trial expired. I cannot say I miss it. It was okay, nothing that blew my mind

I have been using Brave Search for a couple of years and have been very satisfied with the results. It uses its own index instead of relying on Bing or Google like most search engines. The summaries are also one of the few cases that I have found AI to be useful for some more obscure questions.

The image results are very poor though, so I still use DuckDuckGo for that.

I use marginalia search and wiby to find "small web" content. Good for finding more human created resources deeply buried in most search indexes.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ is a decent way of avoiding some ai generated junk.

same here, never found anything on kagi which I cannot using any other search engine.

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

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

If you only searched without exploring its various options and features, that makes sense. When you start blocking, boosting, and pinning domains; start exploring lenses and everything, it's benefits become obvious.

I use Brave Search all the time and like it a lot.

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.

That was exactly what I did, but I still found the quality of its searches ultimately no better than a standard Google search with a basic ad blocker purging the sponsors and AI summaries. Not worth half its price, especially when the guy getting the money is as nutty as he is.

Kagi.

google for porn.
brave-search for everything else

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

Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.

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.

DuckDuckGo is said to cooperate with Google. Brave Search doesn't give me confidence because the browser has had many privacy violation scandals in its code. StartPage is proprietary, but has good privacy laws, since its origin is from the Netherlands, although the service has been down very frequently lately. I think the best is without a doubt SearX my dear friend.
Link: https://metasearx.com/info/en/about

Is your instance public? Wouldn't it need to be to anonymize or privatize your usage?

I used DuckDuckGo in the past, it's pretty nice but it's proprietary and the company is a little bit too much pro-AI. They made a poll about AI approval and despite the majority of people were against, they kept it on their regular website and launched DDG No-AI instead.

Now I've moved to SearchXNG (https://searx.ononoki.org/), and it's very good but the Bing search engine has a weird bug where doesn't give relevant results. You can fix this by using DuckDuckGo and Brave engines instead.

They should have turn it into the default and remove AI or make it opt-in.

Brave search works best for me. Even use Leo for ai results.

I often add the word "forum" to my searches to help get some actual human discussion instead of ad farming AI slop articles. Seems like the only way to figure things out these days.

Qwant off of Orion on iOS. Don't bother with Kagi. There are better options if they switch to graphene.

EDIT: SearXNG is perfect in every way except for consistently returning useful search results.

Running all my queries through SearXNG in normal windows and DuckDuckGo in private ones.

Searxng with custom engine weights and a proper filter of upranks/downranks domains give me as good results as kagi !

Is there a guide somewhere for this?