this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Google is definitely iffy for me, which is why I've been bouncing between alternates. A lot of people like to complain about how google is filled with ads and spam results like Pinterest, but even then it just doesn't really seem to give accurate results anymore, and even when results are accurate it's very surface level. From what I found, it loves to push listicle articles and such when googling a new topic, as opposed to say, Wikipedia or an encyclopedia article. Like if I search about Barbie, I'll probably get a bunch of ScreenRant-esque articles before I get the IMDB page. There have been dozens of instances of me searching for controls for video games and getting clickbait-y articles, some of which barely even make an attempt to answer the question, before getting an IGN or GameFaqs article that's to-the-point and answers my fucking question.
There are definitely better search engines out there, but they all have their own flaws. DuckDuckGo is pretty bare bones and can also give poor results if your search is too vague. You have to adapt to that one. Others like Brave have AI to help out with summaries and stuff, but Brave's management is "problematic" and so some people might not want to support them.
TL;DR: on google, not only is there ads and spam, but it's just hard to find answers anymore. Everything is clickbait. And with other options, they are good but they also have their own major flaws that some might find unappealing.
Exactly, I've noticed this over the past few months, actual relevant results are being pushed much further down the stack.
If you want to explore alternatives, I've been using SearXNG, a so-called "metasearch engine", where you can get a combination of various search engine results, based on your preferences. It's pretty good, when it works (it tends to get rate-limited fairly often... or at least some of its results / search engines do, which can get annoying).
Self-hoster of a searxNG here. With docker, your can spin your own in 1 minute top. I'll never go back to any other search engine, this is the best (imho).
You can also selfhost SearxNG with modest hardware and side step the rate limits. I love it. Happy to answer any questions
How does it compare to Kagi?
I can't self host it, what's the problem with using an existing instance?
I haven't used Kagi much, but my understanding is that Kagi has their own indexing and you can customize your search by ranking your results.
SearxNG runs searches against many other search engines and then uses an algorithm to rank the results sanely. So less customizable but also the net you're casting is much wider.
You could easily self host on a free-tier instance in Oracle cloud or AWS for a year, or even just run it on a laptop. But if you really can't see a way to do that you can of course use one of the listed instances, you'll just be more likely to bump up against rate limits since you're sharing limits with many other people.
Just set this up on my Unraid server and it's amazing. Great suggestion and thank you.
These days I often just skip the first 2 pages and go straight to page 3 for my search results to be able to find anything slightly resembling what I searched for.
Bookmarking this for later. Thanks for this.
Just to help me understand: Why is it that when I try the same search on different instances of this, I get very different search results?
This would depend on the search engines enabled and/or the default language/country set (if any) for that particular instance, you can find those in the settings of the instance itself (and enable/disable whichever you're most interested in, as well as a few other relevant settings).
Woah thank you for this!!
Brave's marketing has always made me uneasy, but it was more like a vague thought. This why I'm intrigued by your opinion. Do you have examples of their "problematic" management?
It's of course biased, maybe for some people it wouldn't be problematic, but the CEO of brave has historically donated to organizations and California state bills that opposed same-sex marriage. This was around 15 years ago (2008 and 2009) so maybe he's changed. But for some people, that might be a dealbreaker. He resigned from Mozilla in 2014 because it came to light that he had made these donations. He apologized in 2014, but for some people that might not be enough.
(note: I'm not trying to be biased with this. For some people reading this, his apology might be perfectly fine for you. But, for others this might be enough to be labeled "problematic.")
Oooh I agree, this is some actual dirt
To focus more on the product there are 2 incidents I think of as to why I don't use brave
honorable mention is their affiliation with crypto
I read an article just yesterday about Brace selling AI access "rights" to other peoples' copyrighted work that gets pulled by their search, too. Like they have an equivalent of google snippets, but with much longer "snippets" of copyrighted books, and they explicitly sell "rights" for people to scrape that and other things for AI datasets, as if their search engine indexing a thing gives them ownership of it.
Also there was that one time they put a link to a neo-nazi website into their list of defaults on their homepage. Yup.
It's all to the point that I don't actually trust a word they say about their privacy protections either, really, even if I were willing to ignore everything else.
Yeah, the crypto stuff is getting too much, plus they're shoving stuff like their VPN, search, and news down users' throat. I used to use Brave as a secondary browser bc of its profile feature, but switched to Orion a couple weeks ago and never looked back.
The affiliate links are done by (almost?) every search engine so it’s not fair to single out Brave for it. Note I’m not defending them, if you’re truly up in arms about it talk about all of them doing it.
Do you have a source for that? I say this because it made the news everywhere when it was exposed. Just to be clear... it wasn't that affiliate links made the index. The Brave browser would hijack what you typed in the URL bar, even if it was the exact URL, with their own affiliate link
Looks like I need to start saving things as I stumble upon them because searching for them later is fruitless. I’ll delete my comment as I can’t dig up a source.
I honestly have never used Brave largely because its logo makes me feel like the developer is way too into WoW. Weird reason to judge a software probably, but sometimes it's best to trust your gut.
I have notice that in the past you altered your terms a bit amd got different results, now the search gives me junk so I alter the phrase and same junk shows up. So it is not as effective at doing a deep search these days that actually matches the search terms.
Have you tried searching incognito? I find the junk is generally tied to profiles Google has on me; they decide based on the data they’ve built up what I should really be looking for.
Searching incognito tends to return results closer to what I got 5 years ago.
I run tracker control, and only essentail scripts can run, all ad stuff is totally blocked.