I’m trying to degoogle. I’ve heard good things about DuckDuckGo and I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and it’s pretty solid. But I’m just wondering what the Lemmy/Piefed community prefer for a search engine.
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Ecosia mainly, I used to use kagi which I liked but I wasn’t sure it was worth the cost although I was thinking about using it again as I really like their small web stuff.
I also used yandex for piracy stuff, I think they ignore all DMCA takedowns or something so it’s much easier to find stuff on it
Kagi. I know it gets trash talked for several reasons, but I’ve used ecosia, duckduckgo, tried searxng, and now I’m back to Kagi. I just like it better all around.
It feels like spam to mention Kagi since it’s all over the place (even on Hacker News), but I’ve been a subscriber since the beginning and it made me a “2x programmer” due to their good results.
If I had no money left, I would try SearXNG.
For programming questions why not use an LLM? The days of searching a specific problem are long done. LLM+Documentation is all you really need now days.
I learn a lot while I search. LLMs may or may not hallucinate, and I’m not learning.
Depends how you use LLMs. I didn’t say use LLM to solve the problem, I have it breakdown the documentation and make it easier to read/provide examples of usage + explain the steps.
Stackoverflow also has incorrect answers always marked as correct and isn’t a great source to learn from, the best way to learn is just reading documentation and having breakpoints to read the data coming in.
I had to make a stackoverflow back in the day to correct so many incorrect answers.
I tired it. I’m not unintelligent, and it was far too complex of a setup for me. I did not care for it. But that’s just me.
Been a Kagi user for about 6 months now. Not one negative thing to say. So refreshing to have good results again.
Kagi user since 2022, according to my account. I’ll admit that I rarely ever cross-check with other search engines. I like their assistants too (they are basically re-selling access to all big LLMs in their Ultimate tier). But you don’t really need those, what keeps me there are the good search results. (And the ability to easily block/raise whole domains on the results.)
I love being able to flip on the "forums"or “fediverse” scope when I’m looking for opinions or recommendations. It saves me having to scroll through a bunch of resellers, manual reporters, fake review sites, AI listicals, etc.
I’m using paid Kagi subscription, and it makes searching for stuff feel like it used to before Big Tech broke the internet. I can actually find what I’m looking for again.
The “SlopStop” feature is worth it alone, but I love how I can choose what types of results and sources to prioritize.
10/10 Highly recommended.
DuckDuckGo.
Like others have said, there’s really no getting around that Google has the best search engine from a functional standpoint. So I use DuckDuckGo for my personal reasons, but if I’m dissatisfied with the results, I will open up a “private” browser and do a Google search.
Edit: I’ll add that this doesn’t happen very often. The last time I had to do this was maybe a month and some change ago.
DuckDuckGo: good all-around search engine
Searx: when I’m feeling extra FOSS
Kagi: when I need Google from 10-15 years ago. Has a cool “lenses” feature that let’s you target the type of sites the results come from. (Kagi is one of those rare moments where I use something proprietary because the more open alternatives can’t meet my needs yet.
Quick! Look it up on AltaVista!
Went from DDG to start page. I’d use kagi if they weren’t frugal with searches.
I’ve been using the HTML only version of DuckDuckGo as my default since Google made JS mandatory to run searches. It works ok for most of the simple queries I make. (e.g. looking something up from the Python docs, MDN, etc.) I resort to Google still for the stuff it completely flubs.
Gone from probably 99% Google + 1% of other to maybe something like 95% DDG + 5% other (mostly Google).
Kagi for well over a year now
I used ddg and startpage, they are both great. Although I slightly perfer ddg, but stays with startpage because it is european.
I also turn on ads to support them. However, now I have more money but less time to scroll pass all these ads, I switched to kagi, which is ad-free and fast. The price is not cheap and they are not based in Europe (they are registered in the U.S. with employees all over the world, which is technically better than U.S. centric ddg), however there is no alternatives that I am aware of.
4get, I self host an instance
Startpage (which is a proxy for bing, but… Yeah)
As much as I hate Microslop, I’ve been primarily using Bing because of the whole rewards thing they have. Although, I obviously wouldn’t recommend using it and instead would recommend DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or OceanHero.
For those who haven’t heard of OceanHero, their goal is somewhat similar to Ecosia but they work towards cleaning the Ocean.
duck duck go is like firefox for me. I use it currently but im sorta moving away from it. I don’t really have a good ddg replacement though.
Not a traditional one, but https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/tvZQHU4Dbf. And if it doesn’t show the results I want, I use Ecosia.
