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Ask HN: What search engines are you using?
Can you share your recent experience with different search engines?
I've tried brave, duduckgo, kagi, start page, qwant, you, searX. Relevance of results is average. I want more organic results, to text made for content (blogs), not text made for clickbait (publishing sites). Add "reddit" to search words to get more organic results is also wired phenomenon.
I just feel that those search engines are more for advertising than searching relevant results. How you deal with that?
For example teclis.com is good for science and academic articles, are there any other search engines more relevant in different subjects?
- suprjami 4y agoDuckDuckGo but it's just Bing and the results suck. Sometimes there's something I know exists and DDG can't find it, but Google does instantly. I'm considering switching back to G.
- andrei_says_ 4y ago!g search produces google results
- CSSer 4y agoI did this for awhile with DDG. I had to do it so much I switched back to save myself typing those two extra characters 90+% of the time.
- andrei_says_ 4y agoMakes sense. I must say I’ve seen an improvement in ddg results over time. But, I have a separate browser instance for work where I’m logged in and use google for the extra benefit of customized results.
- Raed667 4y agoQwant (Lite): I find it works best for French results, but it works pretty good for English as well.
- slim 4y agoit's just bing too :) I get ads from bing using that. (and maybe you should disclose something? :D
- Raed667 4y agoIndeed, disclaimer: I used to work for Qwant. But I've been using them even before ;) It is not just bing though, Qwant has its own crawler and index and only fallsback on Bing when the results are not satisfactory.
- notRobot 4y agoDuckDuckGo, but I've gotten into the habit of !g almost all queries :(
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoI like Kagi. I found that DDG is really bad and often resorted to !g; but I gave Kagi a shot, and it's become my main engine.
- borissk 4y agoGoogle :) It's fast and convenient, but there's no free lunch - one pays with personal data - Google always tries to pretend the concept of privacy doesn't exist.
- thenoblesunfish 4y agoI use Google, and I have a shortcut set up to append things to my search, like "-site:annoyingthinggthatalwayscomesupbeforetherealdocs.com"
- fauigerzigerk 4y agoI've been trying https://you.com/ https://you.com/. The UI can be a bit confusing, which is owed to the fact that they are actually trying something new.
- voussoir 4y agoI don't think I could trust anyone who can afford to buy a domain name like you.com. They're either so rich they've got money to burn on dotcom-era domain names, or they're misallocating what money they have... it doesn't sit well with me.
- ranguna 4y agoSame, search results are actually pretty good around 60-70% of the time. Specially around programming.
- rex_lupi 4y agoBrave search: search.brave.com Occasionally ddg. Rarely google
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xvello 4y agoI have been using Kagi for 6 months now, and really enjoy its clean interface and relevant results. Being able to boost the ranking of relevant domains and downgrade the low-quality ones is a game-changer! To remove pinterest and slackoverflow mirrors from all search engines, I use https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results
- thearrow 4y agoSame. Due to the steady decline in the quality of Google results (even with an ad-blocker), I made the switch. Never thought I would pay for a search engine but my experience with Kagi has been absolutely worth it. I enjoy their product and am aligned with their philosophy so I’d love to see them succeed!
- jmakov 4y agoHaving to have an account and your credit card info, how can they claim to be private? Am I missing sth?
- thetruedoormat 4y agoYou're confusing private and anonymous. Anonymous would be that no one knows you searched "cucumber." Private would be that someone could know that you did but it isn't shared with every single person for any reason. DuckDuckGo for instance is private in the sense that no one knows you searched what you searched, but Bing Ads knows the query to serve you a relevant ad. Signed-in to Google, Google would know your query and target an ad based on it, while adding it to a profile— in other words, it isn't private or anonymous. In a perfect world or using a search engine like searx, it's private in the sense that only the searx server knows what you searched and anonymous in the sense that Google wouldn't know who from that searx instance searched a query.
- jmakov 4y agoThank you, makes sense now. So anything that isn't anonymus can potentially get sold or obtained by the gov.
- eternityforest 4y agoGoogle. I haven't spent much time with the others. I use "reddit" a lot. I wish there was an option to only get results from private individuals on any site. There's a big problem with sites that scrape content from other sites. They're named fiiwebbcjiriebdbjfjeb and the like, and aggregate crap. If you click them the actual page has nothing to do with the preview and is some kind of scam. Sometimes they seem to have exactly what I was looking for but I can't find where it came from, and the site is just a preview plus a scam. I wonder if some are using GPT3 rather than scraping. There's also a problem with less dishonest scraping sites that ate just annoying. Like those sites that make a summary landing page from a github repo and don't actually add much value. They just clog up results. And of course, pintrest, which only has the thing you clicked on about half the time and yet seems very popular.
- pluc 4y agoDDG except when I need to run a simple math "query" that somehow only Google allows to process (mostly when budgeting, 1+1+1+1+1= - DDG doesn't do anything, Google executes)
- mdaniel 4y agoI'm cognizant that it's your workflow, and who am I to butt in, but surely there are local processes available to you that don't involve HTTP round-trips to a datacenter to do math? For example, Spotlight will do math, and then command-c will copy the result to the clipboard
- pluc 4y agoThat's very much my use case though, all my expenses are on my calendar and I add them all once in a while - so the source is a browser tab, I put the equation in the address bar as I'm reading it inline, then hit enter when I'm done and navigate away. Using a local app would actually add one more step to that process.
- aaron695 4y ago
- incomingpain 4y agoI used duckduckgo for quite a long time until they proved to everyone they cant be trusted. Went over to searx, but recently I was getting lots of empty results because they got banned or something. Currently at Brave.
- t0bia_s 4y agoI have similar experience. A lot of SearX searches have time out results - none. Neither for selfhosting SearX or .be. Brave is my currently as well but often cannot find what I'm looking for. I guess a lot of data I need are hidden in Discord chats.
- yucky 4y agoAnother vote for Brave. On the rare occasion that Brave doesn't get the result I want, I'll go back to Google and bypass DDG completely now. My experience is that Brave is better than Google probably 50% of the time, equal probably 40% of the time and then inferior 10% of the time, typically when I need location specific info where Google Maps + Reviews can't be matched.
- culopatin 4y agoI’ve tried Ecosia, I want to use it, but the results are really hit or miss. Basic stuff, sure, but when you’re actually digging for info it falls short. I’m back at google but I wish I had found an alternative.
- OctopusLupid 4y agoI'm not using any search engines. Trying to browse the web using a combination of organically discovered links, portals, bookmarks and history. I'll want to write a plugin in the future that automatically caches the pages I visit, so I can have a local search engine of everything I ever visited. Sometimes I use Wikipedia or Wiktionary to find generic terms. That said... sometimes it doesn't work, and I have to cheat using DDG.
- t0bia_s 4y agoYou mean something like scraping links in pages that you already visited? It's great idea. Visiting wikipedia pages could make list quite a long!
- twerkmonsta 4y agoYandex feels like google classic.
- makerofthings 4y agoI use Google. It’s still the best. Overdoing it a bit on the ads, but they’re pretty easy to ignore.
- t0bia_s 4y agohttps://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/
- bj-rn 4y agoCurrently testing out spot which was forked from searx: https://spot.ecloud.global https://spot.ecloud.global https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/infra/spot https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/infra/spot
- propogandist 4y agoBrave search, which tries to pull in Discussions results, vs Google who originally had a fantastic discussion search feature, but it was killed to optimize the Ads business. Brave has been better than DDG, and the only reason I use Google now is product & price search. Google’s shopping / product search is still unmatched for price comparison and retailer discovery, given many companies feed inventory data to Google for Ads.
- meremortals 4y agohttps://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/ I've been loving it
- twishmay 4y agoFace the same problem you're facing. Our small team at PsyTech believes that your problem isn;t really with Search, as much with Discovery. You should be able to fetch content on a pull basis without plugging in keywords into an input box everytime. To solve all of this, we are trying to build mutter, as a better way to curate for everyone. Please do try it out and share your feedback@psytech.ai, and hopefully you won't have to Search again :) https://mutter.cards https://mutter.cards TS
- mdaniel 4y agoApologies, I didn't see a FAQ and I'm not going to create an account just to find out the answer; according to > Streams are a collection of posts. This is trying to be ... twitter? instagram? reddit? something other than a search engine that would enable one to "discover" the answer to arbitrary questions?
- westcort 4y agoI made my own experimental search engine by scraping the edu domains on DMOZ, using an algorithm to summarize the most relevant paragraphs on each page, and then ordering the results by relevance. It is useful for finding experts and academic departments or programs: https://www.locserendipity.com/edu.html https://www.locserendipity.com/edu.html
- arboles 4y agohttps://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
- t0bia_s 4y agoThanks, that is very useful list!
- askiiart 4y agoWhoogle It's self hosted, and just forwards to Google. But, it's HTML only, with tons of options, and minimizes tracking. It even has an option to route through Tor!
- ranguna 4y agoIf you self host, only use your instance yourself and don't use tor routing, how does it minimize tracking? A single ip is still exposed, so they can just build profile out of that. That's why public searx instances are great, since its a single ip for multiple people.
- helph67 4y agoBecause they regard privacy as important am using Qwant https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/ and Ecosia https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/
- SSLy 4y agoThe apple springboard one - it is location aware enough. I use it the most. Otherwise it's ddg.
- ravenstine 4y agoKagi almost exclusively.
- bradley_taunt 4y agoLibreX https://github.com/hnhx/librex/ https://github.com/hnhx/librex/
- marttt 4y agoFormer journalist here. DDG Lite is my browser start page. In reality, though, "!g keyword" or even "!g keyword site:somesite.com" is still the most common query. Old habits die hard. Strangely, though, I have no problem using DDG on a console-only Linux system (with a text-only browser). I complained about the degradation of Google's search results in a previous thread. Thankfully, a fellow HNer shared some really useful tricks to improve googling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519252 In conclusion, adding "inurl:" and "intext:" parameters have really been a game changer -- to the better -- for me. I'm a fan of old-time, text-heavy Internet, for which phpBB-style forums are a goldmine. So "inurl:viewthread" or "inurl:viewtopic" is my most preferred way to make browsing fun again. As just some guy from the countryside, I'm afraid of the sheer "mass" of Google as a company, all that surveillance capitalism, UI bloat, etc. Dislike the search results prioritizing they do. But, well, in practice, "inurl:" and "intext:" do work fairly well. I also have a list of favorite knowledge-base style websites, databases, etc, for which I aim to write simple custom searching scripts, and combine the results in the end. Something like Julian Assange's Surfraw, only much simpler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfraw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfraw
- vram22 4y ago>I also have a list of favorite knowledge-base style websites, databases, etc Please consider sharing that list on an awesome-x style GitHub account if it is not confidential. It could be added to by others too.
- t312227 4y agoshodan ;) * https://www.shodan.io/ https://www.shodan.io/
- lmarcos 4y agoGoogle. When I cannot find what I'm looking for, then Yandex (feels like using Google in 2006: little restrictions, no uncensored content)
- f0e4c2f7 4y agoNot a search engine but pretty often I will ask GPT-3 a question now if it's not easily googled. Often gives the initial context to Google follow up questions.
- fattybob 4y agoI’ve been appreciating kagi mostly recently, that and DuckDuckGo are the only ones I currently use.
- y0ssr3n 4y agoI've been using Neeva [0] for a few months now. I'm paying for their Premium plan because I want to support alternatives to Google. A few times when I noticed bugs with Neeva I would contact them and surprise surprise a human would actually reply and we'd chat about the issue, and it'd get fixed in a week or so. Before Neeva I'd been using DDG but with DDG I'd frequently find myself going back to Google for complex searches. So far with Neeva I haven't had to resort to Google almost ever. I hadn't heard of Kagi until I saw this thread, but it seems Kagi and Neeva are competing in the same space. Neeva has a cheaper premium plan. I'm curious if anyone has tried both and what they see as the main differences. [0]: https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/
- dotcoma 4y agoQwant, DDG, Brave and Mojeek. EBG (Everything but Google)
- nuker 4y agoSearx.be
- richardsocher 4y agoyou.com CEO here. We are seeing a lot of growth and retention with developers on https://you.com/code https://you.com/code You can vote on which search-apps you like and soon block or pin them completely. You will also be able to submit your own search-apps soon. We believe in an open platform for search.