Kagi is meant to be okay, but it’s paid.

There’s also SearX which you could self host.

https://scholar.google.com/ hasn’t been quite as enshittified

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now, and I never went back to Google. Maybe give it a try !

The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it’s written by a human (LLMs).

I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.

If they’d present you with all that spam content, you wouldn’t find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it’s written by a human, they’re going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.

There’s also at least some measurements, that search results are decidedly getting worse: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/

So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse…

I get my best results with either Duckduckgo or with Searx. Neither run their own index but the independent index searches I’ve tried have been straight up ass. It seems right now the best thing you can do is simply escape the curated personalized results bubbles

Mozilla recently announced some kind of partnership with Qwant. Hadn’t heard of it before, and I was highly skeptical (I’m a very cynical person). I tried it out and honestly I think it gives me on-average better results than Google and Bing does. Since it doesn’t track you it doesn’t personalise the results at all, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t have any ads, though I do use an adblocker so don’t quote me on that. It’s also very snappy. Bing often has long loading times for me, which was incredibly frustrating.

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kagi

search.brave.com

Presenting to the emergency room with hyponatremia, from hypo meaning low, natron meaning sodium, and hemia meaning presence in blood. Low sodium presence in blood !

What if I’m bleeding out from a gunshot wound and I have a crystal that is sufficient diameter to plug said gunshot wound?

To be fair; pretty common.

You could probably use crystals of other elements to treat other deficiencies too, such as iron? But it’s probably easier to just take an iron tablet or eat some food containing iron 😂

Same experience I have had. Swapping to scholar gets me relevant results that aren’t filled with ai gibberish and backwater Hokum. Still have to be careful about study sizes and sigma values and applicability, but miles ahead for at least getting to that being my issue.

Putting scientific in the search criteria should redirect there then.

What’s the scientific term for rocks?

I still remember trying to find the space group for Copper Telluride. No amount of technical terms could help me there.

“There are a lot of results that aren’t what you’re looking for.”

Okay, great?

Brave uses its own index. It used to be supplemented with results from other engines but I believe they have now phased that out.

Brave is the best of the free options in my experience, and it supports “bangs” which let’s you send your querry to a different engine (typing “how far is it to the sun !g” will pass the search to google. Duckduckgo also supports bangs), this is especially helpful for image searches (!gi for google images) since braves image search sucks dogshit 😅

Quant seemed like the second best free option in my experience. Some people don’t like brave as a company for various reasons, so quant may be a good option for those folks. Its my understanding that Mozilla has worked with quant in some way, which is kinda neat.

Both have their own index making them a sustainable/viable option going forward, where meta search engines that use other engine’s results are at the whim of those they fetch the results from (but may provide better results by piggybacking off a larger successful engine)

Ecosia uses the money they generate with ads to plant trees 🌿 (I think it’s bing on the backend)

MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer

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It currently supports the following languages/regions:

Dansk (Danmark)

Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)

English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)

Español (España/México)

Suomalainen (Suomi)

Français (Canada/France)

Italiano (Italia)

Nederlands (Nederland)

Polski (Polska)

Svenska (Sverige)

Source: https://metager.org/lang

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There is a TOR-hidden service too:

https://metager.org/tor

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It is open source:

https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer

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And has other useful features, for example:

[…] you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.

Source: https://metager.org/tips

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Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:

https://searx.space

Brave Search does not use Google and Bing. And why did you skip over DDG?

Qwant was good until they georestricted it for no reason

Try Andisearch, it was the first AI search ever and apart is one of the most private search engine which even actively protect your ID, no ads, no tracking, no logs, anonymous.

Adding as search engine in your browser

https://andisearch.com/?query=%s

Perplexity, well, is still one of the more private AI, but best to use the extension which works well and anonymous (logs only tech data), Chromium only. In Firefox you can use perplexity only as search engine from the website itself.

Don’t forget DuckDuckGo.

Kagi user here.

Bought a month to test it and then went for a year immediately afrer. I really like it!

Hell, typing in “scientific data about minerals” gets me a bunch of university geology department websites.

Why are there so many people pushing for kagi in this thread and skipping over the fact that duckduckgo exists?

It’s a tide ad

I’ve commented about potential Kagi astroturfing here before.

Seems likely to me.

Their trial - too short for me - felt like a private Google w/improvements.

Now, as a filthy freeloader, my default is DuckDuckGo. I am dissatisfied with the results and !bang out to Google (!g) about half the time. I pray DDG makes use of this data to improve their engine.

tl;dr astroturfing vs. bad results vs. enabling the king of adware

Gosh I need to set up SearXNG! Also “private Google” vibes. Instances here

Google results are different for everyone by design. Results vary per person because of assumptions made about what you’d like to see. I believe the term is filter bubbles.

Idk if anything has changed since but a high school teacher showed us this in a computer lab. She gave us an exact phrase to type in and we all compared search results. They were similar enough to be useful but had significant differences in what the first page showed. And we weren’t even signed in to our school accounts, when we did it was even worse.

I pretty much dislike that DDG is not opensource while preaching about privacy and stuff. But tbh no idea what Kagi is.

I know right? Completely ruin geology.

let’s

HERE COMES THE S!

Could be Québécois . They put the dollar sign after the number, rather than before if I recall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt2xW8nh864