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Poll: What is your preferred Search Engine?
- xnx 2y agoGoogle is fantastic. I can't remember I time when I haven't been able to find what I'm looking for including vague concepts or song lyrics.
- echelon 2y agoI have so much trouble with Google these days. I like to ask complicated questions, where keywords are insufficient. Google first removed search predicates, making this challenging. Now their results quality is abysmal. I'm not a fan of OpenAI because of their controversial behavior, but ChatGPT does a great job answering my questions. I can then typically search from there if I need more info.
- disqard 2y agoTry Anthropic's Claude -- just as good, and free (thus far) of the sort of shenanigans one sees with "Open"AI
- fiatjaf 2y agoIs this a comment from 2002? It's been over 20 years that everybody _knows_ Google is "fantastic". The only new thing in the last 5 years is the absurd decline in quality of Google results.
- freehorse 2y agoI have had trouble searching for blogs/sites older than a few years, in particular with image search with all the AI-generated crap that floods the internet now. The same search query in kagi gave me the results i was looking for in the first row which convinced me to do the switch. Otherwise before kagi I was going with google/startpage (uses google index). I tried DDG/bing some point but it was horrible compared to google.
- throwaway519 2y agoI'm sticking with AltaVista for now. They came back against Lycos so could do it again. Anything but Yahoo! though.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoNo love for Kagi? It's the bee's knees.
- georg-stone 2y agoI just added it.
- brianstrimp 2y ago[dead]
- sitkack 2y agoPerplexity? Phind? https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ github.com arxiv.org https://www.semanticscholar.org/ https://www.semanticscholar.org/
- spooneybarger 2y agoI use Kagi, Brave, and Perplexity.
- anaccountant 2y agoPerplexity? Do people use that as their only search engine or just as supplemental to google or whatever?
- georg-stone 2y agoI just added Perplexity
- alextingle 2y agoI'm really starting to like Perplexity. I was relating an anecdote about it earlier today. I was trying to answer an obscure question about the meaning of something in Linux's /proc filesystem. Whatever I entered into DDG or Google, I just got hits where someone had posted a copy of the file into a forum post, so it hit all the search terms, but the discussion wasn't actually about my topic. Perplexity understood the question, and answered it... dead wrong! But its fake "citation" links led directly to several pages where people really were discussing my topic, and they answered my question.
- lubujackson 2y agoI've been loving Yandex lately... it's like 2007 Google.
- readyplayernull 2y agoGoogle was a directory of Stack Overflow for me, then ChatGPT but mostly Claude, and very recently DeepSeek replaced and augmented those knowledge gathering functions. Search Engines are the past.
- sb057 2y agoDDG, but pretty much exclusively for the bang shortcuts.
- georg-stone 2y agoNice! I use Brave because it's mostly better at finding good results but almost exclusively use bangs.
- fiatjaf 2y agoKagi has all the bangs possible and imaginable, and you can configure new bangs. But I barely use them, Kagi results by themselves are already great. And optional LLM summary of results (either by clicking or by ending the query with a "?") is super fast and great specially when you're searching for some easy thing like "how to crop a video in ffmpeg" or "how to do a ternary in kotlin".
- roflmaostc 2y agoStartpage? Backend is kinda Google but still.
- georg-stone 2y agoI just added it.
- vindex10 2y agoit uses both actually: google and bing https://www.reddit.com/r/StartpageSearch/comments/1drkzcq/does_the_startpage_private_search_engine_use/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StartpageSearch/comments/1drkzcq/do...
- bloomingkales 2y agoGoogle is like capitalism. It sucks, but it's the best we got. It's been decades, I can literally feel the cheap quality of results from anything other than Google. It's like holding that cheaper looseleaf that you can see through kind of.
- rspoerri 2y agoThis is not longer true. Try the most used search engines in the poll and you will likely find an alternative with less ad supported links and content.
- mikewarot 2y agoGoogle from 10 years ago was amazing, then they started adding "features"
- jszymborski 2y agoI use Brave Search exclusively after migrating from DuckDuckGo a year ago or so, and I'm very satisfied. I didn't like that DDG relied on the Bing index, and the ads were starting to get a bit intrusive for me. Brave's integrated LLM can be a bit annoying for how it reflows the page, but it can be disabled with a cookie and frankly it's been pretty helpful.
- ninalanyon 2y agoI don't prefer any of them really. I just find DDG the least aggravating. My ideal search engine would be simpler and when I tell it I'm looking for a term it would only return pages which actually include that term in the visible text.
- georg-stone 2y agoYep, none of the search engines are good at that. You might be able to configure your browser to automatically wrap your query behind quotes by using /search?q="%s".
- andrewaylett 2y agoKagi has "Verbatim Mode", and a toggle in settings if you want it enabled by default.
- badameco 2y agonotepad++ also Perplexity is nice
- ricardonunez 2y agoNormtepad++?
- vgivanovic 2y agoYou get what you pay for, one way or another. I prefer to pay in cash rather than in eyeballs, so I use Kagi. No regrets.
- grahamj 2y agoJust started using it, love it
- s1artibartfast 2y agotoo much range anxiety to pull the trigger.
- ufmace 2y agoYup, been using Kagi for pretty much all of my searches for like 6 months I think. No regrets so far, just better search results and less ads and tracking. The money is a pittance compared to lots of other things I do.
- samtp 2y agoBeing able to block domains and have a clean set of results puts Kagi ahead for me
- prawn 2y agoI begrudgingly use Google.
- Philpax 2y agoHuh, I had no idea you could do polls like this. Neat!
- ImaCake 2y agoFormerly DDG but back to Google these days. I actually like the RAG AI summaries for general queries. Maybe having an ad blocker is helping here? I use a mixture of Google, ChatGPT, copilot, and gemini for coding queries.
- assimpleaspossi 2y agoI find Gemini to be the worst of the AI tools. meta.ai for me has been the best for most things. chatgpt is also good if you aren't constrained by the last date it's been updated on the free version.
- jader201 2y agoGoogle today is not as good as Google from 10 years ago, but: a) a big reason for this is that the web is also not as good as it was 10 years ago, and b) it’s still better than the alternatives, much because of (a) (but not solely)
- meiraleal 2y agoThe web is much better content-wise than it was 10 years ago. Google, the web indexer, is now trash with ads and can't bring the best of the web anymore, like it would do 10 years ago.
- leipie 2y agokagi for actual search, Google for products search and chatgpt for answers ;)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoDepends what I'm looking for.
- throwaway519 2y agoFacebook search.. Twitter search?? Wechat search!! A lot of people use social media search.
- techjamie 2y agoKind of surprised how high up Google was in the list with the demographics we have here on HN. The majority of posts I see about search engines are pretty much exclusively bashing on Google for being garbage. Pleasantly surprised to see how many votes there are for Kagi though as a Kagi user.
- wink 2y agoNot garbage enough, if DDG fails, I still get my stuff on Google page 1 or 2.
- jkmcf 2y agoI pay for Kagi, but while the results are generally good enough, they aren't great. I've tweaked the settings recently so I hope I see a lot less crap, especially SO scraped content. Blocking these sites is like playing whack a mole
- AnonC 2y agoDuckDuckGo is my default search engine, but I do find myself using !g many a times because DDG isn’t good enough to beat Google at everything. I’ve heard good things about Kagi here, but its pricing is out of reach, considering multiple people need it in a household.