this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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The dangers of a monopoly. No matter how bad Google gets people will still use it because, in many people's minds, there is no other search engine.
What are those? DDG, Bing, Ecosia etc. are all not really better than Google. I haven‘t tried Kagi yet, mostly because it costs money.
I'm using Qwant and it gives me better results than Google. Even Startpage does and it's using Google behind the scenes.
Google managed to fuck up their personalization so much it makes the results worse (it's almost like they only really care about tailoring the ads /s). And I'm suspecting it's by design, if the results suck the users are more likely to either press the ads or go through more result pages, therefore seeing more ads.
I am actually kinda ok with DDG, but the results are.. not always very great and the second page is filled with weird websites related to my location..
Maybe i should try both Kagi and Searx
Kagi went to bed with Brave, and when people protested they ignored it
Oh boy.. guess the future will really be running our own stacks
What do you mean with "went to bed"?
Here's a Masto thread explaining a bit the polemic
TL;DR: They became partners with Brave, when people pointed out Brave's objectionable politics they responded... poorly (still read the thread, it has much more info)
Quick edit: Was pointed at this, looks like it's even worse and the Kagi owner himself might be very objectionable too
Second edit: And it keeps getting worse, of course they had to get into AI...
Yikes, thanks so much for these links. I've avoided kagi for awhile now for lack of need but it had been top of list of 'things I should try'. Guess I can strike that one out now.
i was struggling with DDG too, but in another post i saw someone recommend searx and it is actually really good.
Fyi searx is deprecated or at least not maintained and discontinued Switch to searxNG which is an active fork and it is really good :D
searxng.site is what i use. i didn't even know it had different forks too
You can actually try kagi for free. 100 searches/month should be enough for you to decide if it's worth the money to you.
(Not affiliated; just a happy user)
Kagi went to bed with Brave, and when people protested they ignored it
That's kinda stretching the definition of 'went to bed'. Brave is one of the result providers you can select as a source, and that's about it
Is kagi a metasearch engine? Or does it have its own crawler and so on?
It's a mix I believe: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
I'm going to give Kagi a try, thanks to this comment - I didn't know there was a free trial.
DDG is on pair with google, that's enough for me. (in some topics far better and in some far worse)
Not for international (non-English) results.
This is 100% true, no contest.
I agree it does suck in general One thing I tried is using a metasearch engine and for the least part I find the results better and way more customizable (for reference I am self hosting searxNG)
same, just being able to blacklist content farms I dislike is worth the price (standing up a container) of admission, but there's plenty more good things.
You can use Kagi for free if you make an account and only use it when the others fail. Love Kagi, but won't pay for it.
eh, ddg is equally bad with it insisting it knows better than me what my query is and "fixing" it, leaving me to have to either fix it or click a link telling it "yes I really did want to search for that and not what you assumed"