DuckDuckGo. I can't live without !bangs.
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Do you mean like !google or !amazon ? I use ddg. Just making sure I know what you mean
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DuckDuckGo, but I've been testing Qwant (also privacy focused) lately as well.
Kagi. Yes, it's paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:
- Actual privacy
- No BS like with DDG
- AI features (like a "quick answer" feature that's really useful)
- Has its own index along with others
- Search results are great, probably better than DDG's
- "Lenses" (basically narrow results by a set of sites)
- Devs are pretty cool
For some reason the thought of a paid search engine has never even crossed by mind before. I've been using DDG but this has peaked my curiosity. Thank you.
Edit: The pricing is... very... meh.
It is very meh. But I think if you're able to, it's well worth the price. Just don't get the standard plan. That one is god awful.
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I didn't know it was privacy focused or that they were building their own index, that's really cool. Do you think it's worth the money?
It's only a few bucks a month. I think so.
The only thing I don't like is needing to be logged in to search. That always feels like a huge invasion of privacy. The at least claim that they don't log search contents though
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Love Kagi. I switched and never had any reason to use Google again. Its that good.
I want to give it a try but it's hard to justify the cost with limited searches. I don't want to have to keep track of how many times I've searched or second guess if I "really need to search for that".
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Duck duck go first, and if results are shit, I default back to google
Duckduckgo for the most part, especially if I already know where I want to get to. Google as a backup like others are saying.
Startpage. It uses Googles results, but you will not get tracked that much
SearX-NG, coming off DuckDuckGo it wasn't a major change in the internal structure (the search gets relayed over to a larger search engine), but there's no one company behind it like DDG. They've been working together with Microsoft on some rather sketchy things.
I would still love to self-host something decent (that doesn't relay over to a company), but nothing like that exists as far as I know.
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Most small search engines use bing results which are a hit or miss compared to Google.
Startpage is the only privacy focused one I found that uses Google search results. The UI is fine for the most part, except the image search maybe.
Edit: typo
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Duck Duck Go. It just works for me. I've never had a problem with it's results.
DuckDuckGo
I also use Firefox search bookmarks for searching specific sites.
Search Bookmark: You prepare the URL with a %s placeholder and give the bookmark a tag, and you can type tag searchterm and it'll open it.
I'm using it for opening word definitions, word translations, searching reference documentation, searching specific platforms/websites/media types, etc.
DuckDuckGo
I've been using SearXNG. It is a fork of SearX, a popular open source metasearch search engine. Basically SearX allows you to use multiple search engines for a search, and only the results are there, no ads. SearXNG changes the UI to be better, adds some other engines for a variety of things to search, like images. Currently I'm using ericafteric.top as my instance; it is the fastest US instance with search suggestions support since I can't selfhost.
I run my own SearXNG instance too. I set it up to a Hetzner box, then blocked all ports from the firewall except on the Tailscale network. This means the machine which wants to use the search needs to be connected first to the same Tailscale network. It allows me to prevent being blocked by the search providers for too much traffic and is been working great. I just open http://SearXNG from my browser and start searching.
DDG first, Google if that fails and I think the query should have gotten good results, Bing Chat if I'm still really not sure about a topic or if I want some of its summarization (or I'm just feeling lazy).
Just Google, unless I'm looking to pirate something. Then I use Yandex.
I use Brave Search. wAs going to switch to Neeva but they are shutting down now.
DuckDuckGo, mainly cause I have used it for years, instances of searxng are too spotty for me for day to day use, and I am too lazy to host my own instance.
I hate adds. I was using Neeva. Just switched to Kagi. After nearly 3 weeks, it looks like 300 searches/month will work for me. So $5 a month is fine.
DDG, it works well enough for me, and not that I got used to bangs I cannot let go of them
brave search on desktop, DDG on mobile.
Google, because of inertia and not being given a good reason to switch.
Another DuckDuckGo user here. I really like it but wish I could use boolean with it.
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I used DuckDuckGo for years but I recently decided to make my own minimalist frontend to Bing API + Brave API and I added bangs of course.
Google. Sue me, I really only care about results when it comes to search. It's mostly just Google and Bing actually providing results and Google's are better.
I moved away from Google because of the results
I use DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo. I wanted something privacy-respecting, but Startpage was blocked in my country and SearX had problems with my language. Anyway I've heard an advertising company bought Starpage so I wont use it. Also bang shortcuts are great!
(Also is it just me or DDG doesn't approve new bangs now?)
Ecosia on my tablet because of nice integrated browser and DuckDuck+Firefox on the PC
Am also checking out Brave on PC at the moment
Bing because I'm getting paid for it
I usually switch between DDG and Bing. I usually get what I'm looking for between these two guys.
I find Ecosia's results to be the better than other privacy-focused search engines, sometimes even better than Google. It struggles with searches in Turkish tho.
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