What to use for search engine. Even ddg is not giving reliable results.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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If you believe Google is the most reliable, you can still use it in a private way via :
- Startpage
Startpage is a private search engine known for serving Google and Bing search results. One of Startpage's unique features is the Anonymous View, which puts forth efforts to standardize user activity to make it more difficult to be uniquely identified. The feature can be useful for hiding some network and browser properties.
- SearxNG https://searxng.org/
SearXNG is an open-source, self-hostable, metasearch engine, aggregating the results of other search engines while not storing any information itself.
There's plenty of public instances too https://searx.space/
Get Google search results, but without any ads, JavaScript, AMP links, cookies, or IP address tracking. Easily deployable in one click as a Docker app, and customizable with a single config file.
Couple of public instances too. Basically SearxNG with ONLY google as a source. https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search#public-instances
I've been happy with Kagi. It's for-pay but it's quality to me.
It’s just a bit too expensive imo.
For something I use constantly every day $10 is nothing
but for something you never use $10 is quite a lot.
$5/mo. If that's too pricey deal with shit 🤷♂️.
Be nice, this isn't the app next door.
I…. Don’t really get why they think this is better. Google search was good…. Other companies can copy AI technology anyway. AI is really just predicting words and wasn’t designed for search, but their old algorithm was.
Whyyyyyy
Google hasn't understood the internet for a long time. They created an excellent search algorithm by treating the internet as a single information system that warranted analysis and indexing for convenient traversal.
These days that's not... Something they're interested in anymore. The goal is to collect user data for targeting advertising and resale. Their core product is still the search bar, sure, but that's just a hook to reel you in. They'll attach whatever buzzword to it it takes to keep it in the zeitgeist. "Ai" is hot right now so that's the buzzword.
I don't get the impression technical competency is something Google values anymore...
There's been some former Google employees with stories about being told by the ad team to scrap mostly completed projects that increased search functionality because in testing it negatively impacted impressions on the "sponsored" search results.
That really says all you need to know.
Beyond that, Google is notorious for having terrible metrics for promotions. It highly incentivises creating new projects and disincentivises maintaining or improving existing systems.
One of my favorite articles about that last part is "I am not a maker"