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Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ohyoutravel 5mo agoKagi. Just use Kagi. It is by far far far the best. Best money I spend, aside from Fastmail. https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
- skipnup 5mo agoAnyone here who uses kagi in a language other than English? Specifically German? Is it any good?
- herrherrmann 5mo agoWorks well for me! Have been using Kagi for well over a year now. (I assume you’re talking about the German search results, not their German UI.)
- fender256 5mo agoGerman works great on Kagi, no problems at all.
- xstas1 5mo agoKagi is good, but only for English language queries
- Shank 5mo agoI find it great for Japanese, provided you search in the Japanese language mode.
- xstas1 5mo agoHow do you set it to search in Japanese language mode?
- robin_reala 5mo agoSecond filter from the left on the results page is the location / language filter.
- nicce 5mo agoI use it for Finnish all the time and it is comparable to Google I would say.
- PartiallyTyped 5mo agoHonestly, same. I don't even think about it, I just and only use kagi.
- haltcatchfire 5mo agoWhat's your monthly usage, aprox.? Do you use Kagi for getting to pages you know of but doesn't want to type the whole URL for, eg. typing "Hacker news" in the URL bar instead of "news.ycombinator.com"?
- malfist 5mo agoI average 800-1000 searches per month and I don't generally search for places I know the URL for (usually only when I can't spell it)
- ranger_danger 5mo agoSeems to require an account... no thanks
- scratchyone 5mo agoAs someone who also loves Kagi, what do you like so much about Fastmail? Seeing it compared to Kagi makes me want to give it a try as well haha.
- coffeefirst 5mo agoI think the comparison is that they just seem to give a shit about putting out a very good product. Filter and snooze automatically is probably my favorite unique capability but it’s less one thing than the overall ethos and execution. Also, real support! Your email is important, you should be able to open a ticket and reach someone that knows what they’re doing.
- plqbfbv 5mo agoJust like parent poster, there's a few things I pay for, and those are Kagi and Fastmail :) Fastmail is... FAST. The page refresh is basically instant, and the UI is super-snappy, well refined and something like 2026, while Gmail hasn't changed in... 15 years? It supports a lot of features (identities, masked addresses, ...), not to mention that I can have my domains properly hosted on it, for 5eur/mo.
- scratchyone 5mo agothank you lol, this has convinced me to switch over to fastmail
- acdha 5mo agoFastmail is like Gmail used to be: fast, good search, functional spam filter. I have my own domain so switching took a couple of minutes and over the next week I realized that I never once regretted it – I saw less spam and I was surprised by how much stuff like infrequent newsletters I’d missed because Gmail was filtering it incorrectly while letting through tons of marketing junk.
- yogthos 5mo agoI just use DeepSeek and I find it works great. You can give pretty loose queries and it will do a good job of finding articles and giving an overview.
- righthand 5mo agoGee at least 15 years too late for this article? How many articles did I read from tech media over the years drilling into people that you could never take down Google because everyone says "Google it" instead of "do a web search"? It's too embedded and consumer choice is stupid because Google it lol!* Google hasn't been "Google" for quite some time. * I use Kagi and DuckDuckGo before that.
- hogwasher 5mo agoThis is because of the Google I/O (developer conference) announcements this week. They're about to overhaul their regular search and make it even more garbage, to the point - so it sounds - of it being more just a Gemini chatbot interface and less an actual search engine, ergo: not Google anymore.
- glouwbug 5mo agoTo be fair, it hasn’t really been one since SEO
- ck2 5mo ago&udm=14
- thenthenthen 5mo agoI have seen this posted many times but can anyone elaborate?
- Nicksil 5mo ago>I have seen this posted many times but can anyone elaborate? Read the article.
- thenthenthen 5mo agoThank you. “ What if you took Startpage and made it simpler? The search engine &udm=14 is named for the string of characters it appends to all of your searches on Google. If you add &udm=14 to your Google searches, you’ll get the same Google results, only without an AI overview. But doing that yourself after every search is pretty annoying. That’s why &udm=14 does it for you automatically.” (Sorry i am in a country where text only websites like Hackernews are one of the few places that load within 5 seconds instead of minutes)
- pndy 5mo agoYes that works but for how long? Facebook main feed could also be tweaked with url parameter that would force display posts in chronological order. But on one day that was "fixed".
- d12bb 5mo agoI switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…
- vitally3643 5mo agoI've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now. If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it. It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way. Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.
- cyanydeez 5mo agoIt was actually difficult to find the AI interaction section. But it was useful when I wanted to find some real info on opensource GIS stuff; it helped me aggregate and review. That's the only integration that makes sense to me.
- piva00 5mo agoSame to me, been a Kagi subscriber for 2 years and only found the AI tool accidentally when I typed a "?" at the end of the query. It was surprising to not be annoyed by a AI feature for once, now I sporadically use it when it makes sense instead of having it shoved down my throat.
- theshrike79 5mo agoIt's good when you know you just want the meat of whatever you're looking for and KNOW every page answering your issue has massive amounts of fluff around it. Something like "how can I access the root filesystem of proxmox?" and you'll get an instant answer instead of a link to the whole ass Proxmox documentation.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoSo much for llms replacing search
- hulitu 5mo agoAt what ? Propaganda ? Can a llm find gwm-1.8d.tar.gz ?
- smgpie 5mo agoI am indeed looking into an alternative to Google recently, but more because of my need of a good search mcp server for my coding agents. I am thinking about either exa or kagi, but I have no idea which one is better. Also exa seems not quite frequently mentioned in the community, wondering why.
- scratchyone 5mo agoI've had generally good experiences with Exa, I use it as an MCP in all my various coding tools and use the API whenever I build an AI thing that needs search. Also an extremely happy Kagi user but can't speak to their API, haven't tried it yet.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- fbnlsr 5mo agoI usually switch between DuckDuckGo and Startpage. Both are good.
- Barbing 5mo agoWhat (What do you search) they stink vs. Google even though Startpage is proxying them. DDG is _not_ a “good” search engine — please, anybody have a hundred side-by-side screenshots to compare identical searches? Edit - also admit Kagi’s great, I’m not affiliated; if you have money Kagi should be the pick (ideally purchased via their more private payment options probably)
- nchmy 5mo agoI've been generally satisfied with ddg for a few years now. Started using it when Google was had obviously turned to shit, didn't look further.
- givinguflac 5mo agoWhat are your metrics for good? I’ve exclusively used ddg for years and have zero issues. You ask for an outrageous level of proof- you prove it’s not good.
- Barbing 5mo agoWhattttttt this is a few bucks of request from some open source model, just been lazy Edit: have to do the work, get the screenshots, & analyze my own patterns. How often do I just need the first link from any search engine (like searching $majorBrand to look for their homepage), how often do I search something esoteric where DDG falters, how often do I search something essentially unique but simply not indexed by Bing (DDG) even though it was submitted to Google just fine, etc.
- givinguflac 5mo agoNone of that says anything about ddg being bad. What does esoteric even mean in this context? I stand by it being a great private search engine.
- nekzn 5mo agoI must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse. I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature contains exactly the answer I was looking for, and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it. It’s been a very positive addition.
- reactordev 5mo agoIt no longer searches for me but tells me to search for what I’m looking for, which brings it back to itself, telling me to go search for what I’m looking for…
- mapt 5mo agoYesterday I tried Gemini "Can you find the origin of this story I remember from 10+ years ago? Here's three paragraphs of what I recall" "Yeah, it sounds like a very common copypasta back in the early 2010's, related to XYZ" "So... uhh... provide me a link please" "I can't provide links" "You're a search engine" "I don't have a current connection to the Internet." "Well can you give me any examples of anything even vaguely resembling this topic?" "Yeah, like in the Reddit thread titled ABC, where $two_paragraphs_of_description" "I can't find that Reddit thread" "I'm sorry! I hallucinated that it was a common thing, but actually you told me a unique thing that you just made up." "This sounds like a contradiction. Where did you pull the information about the Reddit thread from?" "I can't link it, but it was on the sub _____ and it was titled _______ and it talked about your thing at length" "When I google that I find nothing" "Sorry! I hallucinated that I knew the link. Actually there is no link, there is no discussion like that, and the thing you provided was totally unique." I then proceeded to try Googling various permutations of the topics for the thread it brought up, which kept giving me 10 nonsense results, and a grouped collection of Reddit posts that it would not expand on / separate.
- xyzzy_plugh 5mo ago
- perks_12 5mo agoKagi is the only search engine that actually provides me with results comparable to plain Google. I do not need to adapt my searches or learn some sort of syntax to avoid pinterest or other offenders. DDG, Bing & Qwant are just not good enough for my use.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 5mo agoIn my case kagi is far superior to google. Duckduckgo is a middleground (closer to kagi than to google)
- simianwords 5mo agoI don't get the hysteria against LLM here? Like LLM's are the best thing to happen for search engines. They are a huge step above traditional ones like google. So what that google uses LLM's as a supplementary tool for no cost? This really looks like some ideological thing evoking visceral emotions. If you really want the best search engine, ChatGPT with thinking mode enabled is by far the best search engine technology that exists today. There's nothing that comes close. This one is also stupid: > But if a search engine were to operate without ads, could it still make money? > That’s what Kagi is trying to accomplish. For $5 per month — or $10 for unlimited searches — you can access an ad-free search engine without AI overviews. UUuuh ChatGPT exists for $20 per month and does the best searches (amongst other things) and is also ad free. ---- Edit: getting downvoted Firstly, it is pretty obvious to me and everyone else reading that this specific concern that the content producers won't make money is largely performative and insincere. From the article: > many users see this as yet another example of a tech company squeezing AI agents and chatbots into everything it can, making it impossible to navigate the internet without encountering a chatbot This is purely ideological. I can say this because Ads, which are the very thing keeping content alive, is the very thing opposed generally by the same people. Secondly, it is exactly Google, the company that pioneered ads, the thing that people take an issue with, are the ones doing this. Surely such a company knows how to balance ad revenue and long term user growth. If your concern is so valid that content creators won't make money, why do you think Google is doing all of this, especially when they are bound to lose their main source of revenue? It was Google that even made content creation possible by providing revenue. Thirdly, and I can't prove it but I mean this in an normative and a positive way: AI for search is good for humanity, good for content creators as well. The large second order effects can't be explained but making it quick and easy for users to search and provide results for complicated prompts is a _good_ thing. I generally do click people's blogs and learn more about them and follow them. In fact, if the concern were actually sincere, we would be seeing the second order effects more lucidly: lower SEO spam and higher quality publications. I'm already seeing newer forms of content monetisation in the form of substack etc. This is by far a better, more aligned approach than SEO cat and mouse games. I also see advertisements working better because a rich prompt has better CTR which opens up a potentially better content economy. But I predict this very thing would infuriate the same people even more. "How dare I get more relevant ads and make Google richer??" I'm sure what I typed up would be downvoted because of ideological reasons, but the few that think a bit more deeply might agree and see my point. Performative concern is tiring.
- azangru 5mo ago> now that Google isn’t really Google anymore I can't say I've noticed any changes about google search on desktop recently. Yes; there is an AI overview widget at the top of the page; but it's been there for at least a year. Has anything changed about Google search results for you?
- cromka 5mo agoIt did for me, I can no longer find any GitHub project. Duck duck returns them on first try. Absolutely ridiculous, couldn't believe my eyes when I finally realized that. I get a ton of ads and product placements on first couple pages. What I search for is literally, word for word, name of the repository and it's not ambiguous.
- veber-alex 5mo agoHuh? the github page of pretty much anything is always in the top 5 results for me.
- FractalParadigm 5mo agoAnd honestly, that's my biggest gripe. Identical search terms on different systems, or even the same system in different physical locations, almost always return different results from one-another. Telling someone to "Google it" stopped being a reliable way to share information.
- cromka 5mo agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=marine+nav+compass+card https://www.google.com/search?q=marine+nav+compass+card vs https://duckduckgo.com/?q=marine+nav+compass+card https://duckduckgo.com/?q=marine+nav+compass+card It's all products and ads now with Google with anything vague enough that warrants up-selling for them.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoIm curious, what is your query?
- Scene_Cast2 5mo agoI'm surprised that Perplexity isn't mentioned in the article or on HN. It has replaced Google for all but the most trivial queries. It runs circles around Google for finding anything niche or underspecified. I use it through OpenRouter - I love how the pricing is per search and isn't a subscription.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoDo you gave an example query? I am curious.
- lelandbatey 5mo agoPerplexity.ai It's an AI like Google's "AI mode", in that it also surfaces URLs. I have not found it to be a good search engine replacement.
- hamdingers 5mo agoI use Perplexity heavily as my general research clerk, and it's great at that, but I find trivial queries still make up a majority of my search activity. Waiting for an AI response to each of them would be an enormous time sink.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- s_dev 5mo agoGoogle as a search engine peaked in 2005. Since then they've become far more profitable, increased revenue by orders of magnitude, brought search to many more areas, increased headcount massively, improved their share price massively, diversified, serve far more paying customers, become more efficient per query, built data centres, devices and chips with more vertical integration etc. But as a consumer product for simple internet search where I type words and get a list of relevant results it has only gotten slightly worse since then. This is pure observation/anecdotal. I have no measurements to back this up but I think others will share this view.
- cyanydeez 5mo agoyou did a lot of wind up for a "slightly worse" when half the first page is either AI or advertisement; they ditch pure keyword matching with "feels like you want this" matching which works for serving more ad to more eyeballs for longer. For bland searches, sure, its 'slightly worse' but for the ability to find verbatim results necessary to drill down into a subject it's absolutely worthless.
- 59percentmore 5mo agoThis comment reads as, "It's been bad forever, but only a little, and look at all the good stuff that happened!" Let me correct. Search was good as late as 2010, when they changed the engine to facilitate an "instant search, search-as-you-type" feature. It was decent until around 2015, when a pivot to privileging "brands" poisoned the results. And it's been useless since the pivot to semantic search (in part to facilitate Home/Nest products) and a series of index purges over the past few years. We had something very good, and we had it for a good while, and it was destroyed by a company that was a blackhole for investment and some of the brightest minds of my generation, sucking up untold amounts of labor and radiating little but "exceptionally deleterious to society" particles.
- tsukikage 5mo agoYou are the google search engine pre-2010, well before Google lost their "don't be evil" motto, made the first results page favour sponsors and added AI overview. You respond to a search query with a list of https:// URLs, each accompanied by a representative quote from the destination page that demonstrates the link's relevance to the query, and nothing else. The query is: <insert your query here> We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have built it with our own hands and it is here to stay.
- kurthr 5mo agoI had to laugh as I read this, but it feels so appropriate to the current state. I will say off topic that, speaking to an early googler, there is actually documentation of meetings where they discussed what "don't be evil" meant and decided actual business options they should and should not pursue. It was not just a motto or a "code of conduct", but meant as and used to justify consequential actions.
- account42 5mo agoApparently letting them get McDonnell Douglas'd by Doubleclick was not considered being evil?
- GuB-42 5mo ago> https:// Pre-2010 Google search didn't use https by default, almost no one did besides specific cases, like processing payment. And even then, only the critical part was https, the rest, like images was plain http. So, for a true pre-2010 experience, you want http:// links. Post-2010 Google played an important role in pushing for https. From boosting https search results, to Chrome being annoying to unencrypted connections, to sponsoring Let's Encrypt, to forcing HSTS on their TLDs. I kind of miss http, it was a time when the web was a public thing, a place for sharing, not for keeping secrets. But to be fair that's just nostalgia, the modern (commercial) web that generalized encryption enabled is so useful and convenient that I can't imagine going back.
- account42 5mo ago
- Polarity 5mo agoI switched to Kagi years ago, never looked back.
- iamalizard 5mo agoWhat about a distributed way of doing search, does that exist? Different people/bots scrape the net and add it to a distributed database optimized for search. Each query could cost a crypto micropayment to avoid DDoS. Or maybe a slightly larger payment to download the whole database so you can use it privately or create a competing centralized or decentralized search. Yes, we hate crypto, but it seems useful here. It's bad if 1 entity can gatekeep both the database and access to it, no matter how non-evil they seem now. We might even index torrents, use speech-to-text for music, movies, video clips and other things like that. So you'll search for a phrase from a movie and it will be there even though no one mentions it on any website. A couple of issues I can think of with that decentralized approach: * copyright - fuck it, it's decentralized, it can index whole books, maybe partnering with Anna's Archive or LibGen. Maybe have a copyright-respecting database and another one that doesn't respect it if you foresee the man coming down on the project. Maybe the results from the DB that doesn't respect copyright is merged at query-time with the one that does. Or maybe, the DB that doesn't respect copyright is just a superset of the copyright-respecting DB. I don't know how easy it would be to simultaneously search more than 1 DB. * privacy - it could run over Tor or at least allow people to access it via Tor. The privacy of the cryptocurrency also seems doable - we have Monero and other private coins but I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement private micropayments with these. * spam, intentionally wrong archives/crawls - pay the people who submit sites something so they financial motivation to not lie. Some consensus-based reward mechanism could be used, not sure which one * moderation, illegal content - we don't care about copyright but likely don't want real CSAM, real animal abuse and other obviously awful content. Rewards should also be able to be used somehow for moderators or for people flagging content. We might even have a decentralized way to flag/tag content for anything at all - "AI generated" or "human generated", "small web", "uses Cloudflare", etc.. * how the distributed database actually works, how searching it works, who connects to whom when making a query and so on. I hope there are smart people with knowledge on such systems (not me lol) who can shed some light on whether it's possible and how.
- vucetica 5mo agoI liked Kagi a lot, but gave up on it as I couldn’t configure it as a default search engine on iOS. Ended up with Duckduck go.
- kavok 5mo agoYou can set Kagi as the default search engine today on iOS. Unless I’m misunderstanding.
- okuntilnow 5mo agoOnly with an extension, at least in the UK.
- nate8bit 5mo agoBrave.
- timpera 5mo agoBrave Search has its own index which is fine, 10 blue links and no forced AI, and more importantly support for DDG-like "bangs" (like !gi sending you to Google Images), without DDG's performance issues. I highly recommend it for people who don't want to pay for Kagi.
- kgwxd 5mo agoBrave is such a horrible brand. I don't think they'll succeed, but they're definitely trying to do MS-style EEE. Browser, search engine, and security (nefariously called "ad blockers" by the people that don't want users fully controlling traffic and code that reached and runs on their machines) should forever be separate entities.
- someguyornotidk 5mo agoI've been using Brave for years and have no complaints. Their browser's security is better than Google Chrome thanks to them disabling a lot of the stuff that Google ships and keeping their own stuff disabled unless I opt in. Brave browser is private by default (unlike Firefox)[1], and it doesn't try to force me to accept an EULA or terms of service just to use it. Their search engine isn't the best but none of the search engines I use are, not even Google. So to me, they've already succeeded. Can you elaborate on the issues that make you think they haven't? [1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-browser-in-terms-of-phoning-home/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...
- fooker 5mo agoBrave's MITM for ads (supposedly) after client side decryption has killed the brand for me. They seem to have walked back some of this, but it seems pretty unclear what and why, and I'd rather not try to find out given there's nothing stopping them from doing such things.
- rdmuser 5mo agoFor searches where you want more that just the first result and want a depth of results to go through and maybe even check out more than the first page of results I like to use meta-search engines that grab results from multiple sources. Plus it helps route around censorship since you are getting results from a variety of sources. Searxng is the best known one. I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy. On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere. https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
- HappMacDonald 5mo agoI'm going to point this out as the hidden gem of the thread. I just gave etools.ch a test by feeding it a query I had repeated and refined on every other search engine many times over the past 20 years and never made headway, and it found it immediately. So, now I have a nice video clip of "The Ballad of the S.S. Forgetful", which it turns out aired near the end of Sesame Street Episode 2130. :)
- kmfrk 5mo agoEveryone's tired of hearing about Kagi, and the good news is that they have a free trial now so you can just see for yourself instead of reading comments after comments about it: https://kagi.com/signup?plan_id=trial https://kagi.com/signup?plan_id=trial.
- 59percentmore 5mo agoThe number of "Kagi" comments here is amusing (suspicious), considering how few people actually use Kagi.
- t-writescode 5mo agoSometimes there is, actually, a vocal minority. And at least I know that I am happy to talk about a product that I pay for. Is some of it because I feel like there's a sunk cost - the amount of money that I've paid into it? Yes, of course there is. Is it a good search engine? Yes. Do I wish there were features added to it that they've promised for a while now? (namely being able to pay for more AI credits, especially if you paid a year in advance?) Yes.
- taintlord223 5mo ago[flagged]
- daveoc64 5mo agoIt's a niche service that is almost perfectly tailored to meet the needs of HN users. It's a paid-only service, without ads - "you are not the product", that lets you hide results from popular (to the mainstream) sites like Instagram and Pinterest, and to filter out low-quality sources like W3Schools, while raising MDN and the Arch Linux wiki to the top.
- BrunoBernardino 5mo agoWhile there are good alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, or Ecosia, there are also ad-free alternatives, where you're not the product, like Kagi [1] or Uruky [2] (I co-founded Uruky, which is also currently and for the foreseeable future "No-AI")! [1]: https://kagi.com https://kagi.com [2]: https://uruky.com https://uruky.com
- aloisdg 5mo agois it foss?
- BrunoBernardino 5mo agoNo, but you do get the source code after 12 months of being a paying customer (signing an NDA), though we're considering releasing the code under AGPLv3 if we reach 300 monthly active accounts (we just reached 100 last week) before next year.
- yegg 5mo agoJust FYI, at DuckDuckGo we have a search setting to turn ads off: https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings We also have a no ai version: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
- latexr 5mo agoI hadn’t looked at the settings page in ages. Some interesting stuff in there. You can even block certain websites now (goodbye, Pinterest). It’s time I give DuckDuckGo another go. As I fiddle with the options, I was about to suggest there should be a private way to share settings to another device so I don’t have to redo everything on my phone, then I looked at the right side of the page and saw you already provide that! Overall great work, major thumbs up. Looking forward to trying some searches with you again. I do think I may have found a bug. Blocked sites aren’t being set across devices, neither by using the cloud save nor the bookmarklet.
- 5mo ago
- Zigurd 5mo agoAltaVista was excellent. On a different timeline we'd be searching on AltaVista running on Alpha chips.
- abcd_f 5mo agoAltaVista had so much noise that it was basically unusable... which exactly the issue Google solved and why it still exists and AV doesn't.
- dmd 5mo agoI really really really really want to love Kagi, but every time I try it (and I just spent a month trying it, ending a week or so ago), I end up back at Google, finding that my search results are better. I think the reason is my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches that Kagi's index just isn't good enough for. I am never searching for something like "best mattress" or anything else that is heavily SEO'd - it's always something very specific - so the result page in Google looks pretty much exactly like the Kagi page, only it nearly always has the result I'm looking for where Kagi's doesn't.
- niam 5mo agoInteresting. Many times I find the opposite case, where my long tail search on Kagi will turn up SOME stuff that's kind of pertinent to the subject, and I'll swap to Google to see if the results are better there, only for it to barely have anything pertinent. The main issue I've had with Kagi is that using "before:" and "after:" just seems weirder than it does on Google, and will throw in some stuff that's visibly outside the ranges I selected sometimes.
- feedyourhead 5mo ago> my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches any chance you have an example of such searches off the top of your head that you wouldn’t mind sharing?
- dmd 5mo agoNot the greatest example because they both do find me, but here's an example of where Kagi is supposed to be better at precisely this, but isn't. Search without quotes for daniel drucker mclean. That's me, and Google correctly on the first page finds ONLY pages related to me. Kagi pollutes the page with many results for my doppelgänger, the much more famous Daniel J Drucker of the University of Toronto, even though none of those results mention mclean. That is literally the thing Kagi was supposed to be better at - actually respecting your search terms instead of thinking it knows better!
- 5mo ago
- WhyNotHugo 5mo agoI switched to DDG a long time ago (maybe close to a decade now?). There's plenty of reasons to dislike Google, but my main reason for switching was better quality results and a faster, simpler UI. The UI has gotten a bit clunkier over the years, but it's still good, still more focused than Google's. As I write this, I give Google Search a quick try and notice that the first thing you see is a full-screen cookie banner!? On my laptop, I even have to scroll to reach the Reject/Accept buttons, and keyboard controls don't work at all. I can't believe people still use this crap.
- k8s-1 5mo agoAlso a long-time DDG user here, the lack of AI chat by default at the top of searches is great, if i wanted to use AI I wouldn't be opening a search engine.
- projektfu 5mo agoSad, because Google's homepage was once a paragon of bloat-free design. While their competitors enshittified, Google kept just giving good results fast without a lot of junk. They became the 90+% market share leader, and enshittified thereafter.
- geoffbp 5mo ago+1 I did the same a few years back. It’s fine most of the time. Their AI assist is ok as well. No complaints here, can always fallback to google if the results aren’t good enough
- postalcoder 5mo agoWhen is Cloudflare stepping into the game? I know many here are wary of CF's increased role in the modern internet but if they can throw a wrench into google's monopoly, I'm all for it. They intercept a non-trivial portion of the web's traffic and presumably are as equipped as any other company is to build a good index. They're also the only the only company that has an interesting alternative incentive structure for creators.
- nicbou 5mo agoI don't expect the boot on the other foot to taste any better
- westurner 5mo agoThey used to have: - Organize the world's information - Don't be evil Who was president at this time? Was this while they were denying students the option to code on the computers we bought for them because security? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil : > Between 21 April and 4 May 2018, Google removed the motto from the preface, leaving a mention in the final line: "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right – speak up!" That sounds like NY to me.
- iamalizard 5mo agoPeople think Google removing "Don't be evil" means Google somewhat implicitly told everyone they'll be evil from now on. That doesn't make much sense. It was likely a marketing decision since having "evil" in your motto is not good even if you explicitly state "DON'T BE" before it. Just like if I write in my profile text "I'm not a pedo", you'll think "this guy is likely a pedo"
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gomox 5mo agoI would have loved to be in the room when this decision was made, but my guess is that they decided that it was better to face some subtle nerd backlash now rather than having this quoted at the start of countless congressional hearings over the next decade.
- HappMacDonald 5mo agoDon't create the Torment Nexus
- GodelNumbering 5mo ago> "Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch" I would rather not. Edit: clarifying that this is not strictly due to ads. I think the article itself is an ad judging by the slug 'six-search-engines-worth-trying-now-that-google....'. Usually such articles include a plug. I am not disabling adblocker to read that plug
- Rp8yXmdmr 5mo agoOn one hand browsing web is completely impossible without adblocker. On the other hand the only sites that can survive without any ad revenue are product spam blogs that participate in "Amazon PartnerNet" and similar affiliate programs. Well, unless Google AI starts stripping referral link or replacing them with own one (Honey/Brave style). Do we even need search engine when there are just few hundreds of huge sites left?
- carlosjobim 5mo agoTurn on reader mode.
- Cakez0r 5mo agoReeks of product placement and astroturfing
- asciimoo 5mo agoOhi, I'm the author of the open source Searx metasearch engine. I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the same goal when I started Searx development: reduce dependence on online search engines. Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore saved content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines. This is a fundamentally different approach than what Searx follows and solves most of the weaknesses of metasearch engines. Of course it has its own weaknesses as well, but most of these are not conceptual and can be resolved by improving the software (and datasets) I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid relying on external search engines - and even websites listed in results - more and more frequently. The initial reception is overwhelmingly positive with already more than 30 contributors and hundreds of contributions. Currently it can help with "recall" type searches mainly, but I'm planning to provide pre-indexed thematic datasets and I'm drafting a peer-to-peer index sharing concept. Maybe you can find it useful as well (or at least have some constructive criticism =]). Links: - https://hister.org/ https://hister.org/ - https://github.com/asciimoo/hister https://github.com/asciimoo/hister - Background/motivation/beginnings: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependence-in-half/ https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependen... - Small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/ https://demo.hister.org/
- rdmuser 5mo agoIt's great seeing some more varied takes on search engines like this. That's essentially the same reason I use inoreaders rss search to find articles when I want to revisit them etc and it has been super handy. I know there have been some projects focused on rss search engines like OpenOrb that have some similarities to Hister. Makes me wonder if Hister could seed its history using rss.
- asciimoo 5mo agoIt isn't supported yet, but it's a good idea and quite simple to implement it. I've added it to the issue tracker: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/issues/431 https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/issues/431 . Thanks for the suggestion.
- theodric 5mo agoudm=14 is still working for me (for now) to disenshittify the results. You can use my Firefox extension to inject it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search-arguments/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
- peesem 5mo ago`&udm=14` just sends you to the "web" tab of search, which does remove the AI summary, but you also lose the widgets that google puts at the top of search, if you like those (weather, calculator, games, etc). one of my friends recently found that you can add a short invalid filter parameter like `&tbs=1` and it'll give you the main search with no AI but with those widgets if they would normally appear. you do still get the "People also ask" section, but that's probably easily removed with an extension or user script
- theodric 5mo ago`-ai` was doing that for me a few months ago, but I'm afk and haven't tried it recently
- peesem 5mo ago`-ai` isn't actually a special case that removes the ai overview, it just adds a search filter which removes all results with the word "ai". afaik the ai overview is simply less likely to show up with a filtered search
- daft_pink 5mo agoI’ve tried them all and found that Kagi is the only one that my subconscious feels is equal to or better than google.
- ilaksh 5mo agoWhich of these alternatives actually doesn't use Google under the hood?
- ianhxu 5mo agoNot sure how Brave is. I'm using its API on OpenClaw, and so far my experience with OpenClaw has been satisfactory — though search is only one part of the overall quality. I'd guess due to compute constraints, AI overview will struggle to reach truly great quality. That said, for now I find adding this section at the top still useful to me. The broader decline in Google's search quality is the bigger drag on me.
- rurban 5mo agoBefore switching to seek.ninja I used DuckDuckGo.
- btown 5mo agoSurprised not to see a mention of https://tenbluelinks.org/ https://tenbluelinks.org/ here. Google still maintains a web search mode that's free of AI overviews/chat exhortations (as well as ads, if you use an ad blocker). https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&udm=14 https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&udm=14 is the format of the search URL, and tenbluelinks has instructions on how to use it as your default engine on various platforms. That said, I've stopped using this as a founder. While I personally like the web search results more (if I wanted synthesis of results, I'd use dedicated agentic-loop-capable tools that are a hotkey away), it's far more important to understand (and empathize with) our users' experiences, good and bad, when they use Google in its full AI extravagance in practice.
- someguyornotidk 5mo agoGoogle hasn't been useful to me as a general search engine for a good while. I've been using Ddg and Brave for general search and Yandex for deep-ocean expeditions (of the jack sparrow variety) and topics that US tech giants censor. I am looking for good Chinese search engine so that I can search things that Yandex censors or when Yandex's bot detection goes crazy (I get blocked with infinite captcha about 25% of the time). The only thing Google remains good at is local search. If I want to buy something locally, nothing else comes close.
- ivanjermakov 5mo agoOver the past 10 years I've been using general search as little as ever. For 95% of my requests I know the website that will resolve my request. DuckDuckGo bangs are a great feature for landing on a specific website with your search: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
- Kuyawa 5mo agoI don't know what a search engine is anymore, I use Brave search and usually the AI response is more than good, I can dive deeper in AI if needed. Before, search engines provided links, links provided the info we were looking for. Now AI provides that info without the middle man, links are just a footnote in case you need them.
- thisisauserid 5mo agoI miss the old days of two weeks ago when you guys complained that Google Search was unusable for non-AI reasons.
- latexr 5mo agoIt annoys me to no end that Safari only gives you a limited set of search engines to pick from. Changing it to anything else requires a cumbersome trick of catching a search URL and redirecting to something else, which not only stops you from using that particular search engine, it makes every search slower you’re sending your query to two entities instead of one. Seeing as Apple has reportedly partnered with Google to power their LLM offering, I don’t expect that to change soon. I hope I am wrong.
- carlosjobim 5mo agoOn MacOS Safari you can set your homepage / new tab page to whatever search engine you like. It's almost as convenient. On iOS it's worse.
- latexr 5mo agoThat doesn’t work for me because it’s very common that I’ll just repurpose the page I am on by doing ⌘L and typing something. Plus, my tabs open with the Start Page, showing my Reading List and iCloud Tabs, so I never even see the homepage.
- ape4 5mo agoDoes google have a option to avoid AI summaries?
- wizard831 5mo ago[flagged]
- axegon_ 5mo agosearxng works well but it's not perfect. I tried qwant for a bit but results were mediocre at best. Kagi, I've shared my views on why I'd never use it. I wouldn't use it even if they paid me to use it in fact. For the time being I'm swapping between searxng and ecosia, the latter has been giving me the best results for just about anything(and I hope their indexer partnership with qwant pays off). As for google - even before the change, results were absolute crap, not a recent thing but since around 2020, the quality of the result hit rock bottom and they have been hard at work, drilling into the rock ever since.
- mock-possum 5mo agoI appear to be one of the rare few that doesn’t have any trouble - or even see much difference - in the ‘new’ google (non-) search. Maybe this is a frog in boiling water situation but… it’s just the same search as it’s always been, there’s just now a chunk of Gemini up top, that you take with a grain of salt, same way you’d take the promoted results. If you don’t like it, Adblock it. When I ask myself honestly, has google search gotten worse over the past 25+ years? My answer is… ehhhhhh… not really? Other people have always claimed google was ‘getting worse’ and I just don’t see why it should be any more true now than it was then. Isn’t this just the latest round of whinging?
- goosejuice 5mo agoWhat's your method of blocking promoted results, recommended products, etc? Digging through the crap in a Google search is like finding a recipe in a blog. Sure, it's there, but the experience isn't great. I'd rather pay for a better experience, like buying a cookbook or subscribing to nytc. If you can afford it, why wouldn't you?
- acdha 5mo agoIt’s unambiguously worse, in part because they backed away from spam filtering after merging with Double Click when the SEO parasites started buying tons of AdWords. There were multiple years where they’d rank the sites which scraped Stack Overflow, GitHub, Wikipedia, etc. higher than the sources, which is not a problem on Kagi in general but also one Kagi doesn’t refuse to give you tools to solve: a Kagi user can block low-quality domains and never see them again. Google not only doesn’t offer the option but if you ever click on a spam site they’ll treat that as a sign that you want more.
- heroku 5mo agoYou can't replace google, not in a million billion years..
- Ylpertnodi 5mo agoBrave search does well for me.
- mattmaroon 5mo agoFor the first time in their history Google was finding themselves losing market share to ChatGPT. It wasn't a huge amount yet but it was clearly going to become one. That's what this is. The idea that the end user doesn't want this is preposterous. Those of us who make money off the web don't want this but the end user absolutely does. This is going to happen whether Google does it or not. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
- hununu 5mo agoI find the bigger problem now is how many top results on search engines are AI written websites.
- diabllicseagull 5mo agoI'm using uBlock's AI Blacklist. It doesn't remove AI generated pages from search results but when a page doesn't load, you know.
- gcatalfamo 5mo agoHonest question: isn't AI Google better than the Standard Google of the past 2 years? I mean all the privacy concerns are still there, but the current product is just better than the SEO SPAM-ridded result page we used to have.
- kriskrunch 5mo agoI turned off AI overviews in Google search a few days ago. It's often wrong and always distracting. I changed my default search engine to: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 Author should mention that you can change your browser's default search engine.
- lakatadam 5mo agoAppreciate the advice! Took me a little bit to figure out how to do this, so I'll drop a useful guide: https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/ https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/
- yanis_t 5mo agoIf google stops driving traffic to the websites, website owners will have zero incentive put out new content, and then what?
- dannyfritz07 5mo agoI think the endgame is you go to Google or your favorite subscription based LLM for knowledge instead of visiting websites. Ads can continue living within LLM search results and it can even become a marketplace where you order within the LLM environment.
- preommr 5mo agoWhat websites? I feel like this is a scene from a movie where a character goes "what are you talking about? Look around us, it's already gone" (idk why i am picturing Mark Whalberg for some reason). But it's all just reddit, medium, twitter (twitter pages, w/e those blog things are). The internet as we knew it is gone, man.
- lexoj 5mo agoIs it me or the mentions of Kagi on HN are overly positive?
- K2h 5mo agoa list of engines I ran across the other day: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-... The three dominant English search engines with their own indexes are Google, Bing, and Yandex but this list has many spiders and engines that traverse the web.
- steveharing1 5mo agoFor me its either bing or duckduckgo
- hulitu 5mo agoThey are all crap. The best seems to be, unfortunately, yandex.
- 0xAstro 5mo agoI am surprised people are not talking about Brave and its goggles which allow to block off crappy searches like pinterest all the time + a neat community feature and biggest point, its own search index.
- lagrange77 5mo agoI'm using the 'Hacker News / 1k short' goggle all the time.
- pndy 5mo agoThere's uBlacklist extension for browsers that helps filtering out search results from "offensive" sites and it works with most popular engines - including Brave Search https://ublacklist.github.io/docs https://ublacklist.github.io/docs
- rglullis 5mo agoI've been using Brave search since it was first announced. Initially it had to rely a lot on their "fallback mixing" (where it ran an anonymous search on Google to get more results), but after a year or so I disabled it and never looked back.
- dwa3592 5mo agoMy search on google is still fine. On some searches it doesn't show the AI overview and on some it does - sometimes the AI overview is exactly what i am looking for and sometimes i just scroll down.
- nicbou 5mo agoI find the results much worse though, especially in the last two or three months. My query is treated as a vague suggestion instead of a command, and the search index has become noticeably smaller.
- ammar_x 5mo agoI've used Brave Search and found it better than Google's in some cases
- rahadbhuiya 5mo ago[dead]
- amelius 5mo agoActually, I think Gemini is great. And the AI overviews are quite good. I think Google is getting its act back together.
- hmokiguess 5mo agoAny that have a free developer api? Google has shutdown theirs https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
- alexandre_m 5mo agoI pretty much only use Google for news searches these days. Even then, it’s mostly just to get a surface-level view before cross-referencing with other engines for anything important. There’s so much content getting buried now. If you’re looking for anything remotely niche or legally gray, like sports streams or ebooks, you’re often better off using Yandex or you’ll never find it. The old Google search engine that used to properly index and surface the open web has been gone for a long time.
- augusto-moura 5mo agoI'm using Ground News for skimming through the news, their ads are everywhere, but it is a somewhat good product. I pay for the most basic plan and it is pretty cheap. If I want a deeper dive in some story I look the links to the original posts their provide
- photochemsyn 5mo agoYandex is excellent if you want something that behaves more like a old PageRank version of google for news and historical information that isn’t filtered to amplify corporate media outlets. DuckDuckGo is also pretty good for that task, though it is interesting to compare and contrast DDG and Yandex output, they’re typically quite different, but equally useful. The last use case I had for google was Google Scholar, but it now appears to block anyone who blocks google tracking. But this is where ChatGPT does an excellent job of generating lists of technical papers and reviews and it interprets natural language queries with no problems. The kind of complex logical search queries google used to support (what, 15 years ago?) can be written without strict logical language (! & | ()) and all that. Pubmed isn’t bad for cross-checking and simple searches. And if you put sci-hub into the yandex.com/search box and click on yandex ai it tends to tell you where the current active sci-hub sites are, which is handy.
- tokai 5mo agoOpen Alex is a good Google Scholar alternative.
- wuhhh 5mo agoI used Kagi for a bit but began to question what I was paying for, there are plenty of other search providers basically doing the same thing, DDG, Ecosia, Brave search etc. I mostly just use DDG now because search as a paid offering that scrapes results from other indexes doesn’t seem like good value
- prism56 5mo agoI'm in this boat, currently subscribed and with the news of them potentially stripping out the AI offering from the $10 subscription tier, I might give DDG another shot. It just doesn't seem to surface much reddit content. I know I know reddit, but on niche topics they often have some good discussions/links/experts.
- yegg 5mo agoIf you mean on DuckDuckGo, we have a (relatively new) reddit module that should surface that content if you add reddit to your query.
- IAmGraydon 5mo agoIt’s crazy that a company like Google, full of very talented people, is making a decision that is so obviously bad. I’m convinced Silicon Valley is so deep in the AI hype machine that these guys have completely lost touch with reality and have no one left to ground them.
- artooro 5mo agoBrave Search is the best alternative because of their independent index, the AI results are still fairly good as well. And their browser rocks because of the built-in ad-blocking including for YouTube, and the ability to filter out all YT Shorts on the mobile app.
- starkeeper 5mo agoIt is pretty sad that google has embraced enshitification for search results for what more than 10 years of decline now? And then this. DuckDuckGo is about to surge!
- visarga 5mo agoWondering if anyone considered the idea of saving search stubs and using local LLM as agents with it. Could cut the search engine completely from the loop. The idea is simple: collect search stubs, short documents with routing information about a topic. When you want to search something your agent finds the right stub and looks up where on the web to go find that information. Your information is always fresh, while a search stub changes slowly, over years, because the entry points tend to be more stable. If we use a 4B local model and another 4GB for search stubs it could be portable enough to download and install. As you use it you also generate your own search stubs on top of the generic package. A stub could contain links to news feeds, high quality hubs, search engines and of course, actual websites. High quality search stubs can be generated with any frontier LLM piggy backing on its agentic search capabilities. I think the idea of managing a collection of search stubs as a replacement for centralized search engines is important because it would wean us of one of the last centralized points of the internet. Google plays many ranking games on top of users and publishers, serving their own interests first. I want out of that arrangement. local LLM + local stub index + proxy == anonymity
- dools 5mo agoThe funny thing is that as much as everyone complains about AI overviews and Google losing the plot and so on, about a year and a half ago the “where did you hear about us” field on my website stopped being dominated by “Google” and started being dominated by “ChatGPT”. Normal people are using AI for search more already, Google is just trying to stop their primary business from completely disappearing.
- andai 5mo agoI do mostly use AI instead of Google these days. When I do use Google, it's because I want to use Google and not an AI. But Google increasingly shoves AI in my face.
- bojan 5mo agoI'm using chatbots for search, but that's only because Google became so horrible at it. I'd rather just have results without chatbot fluff.
- nihsett 5mo agoMy dad exclusively uses perplexity and I think completely stopped using google. It's definitely more common than we realize.
- neop1x 5mo agoBut then what's the point of using google if I can use any chatbot directly. They are transforming google search into chatbot but they already have a chatbot and by dping that they are losing google search product completely. I miss times when search used to be fulltext search (also in youtube, ebay, etc). Now it is some kind of embedding vector search skewed by marketing and my previous visit history. It often shows completely irelevant and useless results and it is much harder (even impossible sometimes) to find something even though I am sure it exists (and I am able to find it eventually but it takes much more effort).
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jdw64 5mo agoDuckDuckGo?
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoHaha, I was going to say "why not bing.com?", but I just tried it with search term 'opencode' and got literally only 3 text results and then the "next page" button. The next page had 6 results, the next page had 13 results. I'm not sure how, but having more money seems to result in worse technology
- geoffbp 5mo agoBing is dead I suppose?
- rickdg 5mo agoIf you can pay for it, use Kagi.
- woadwarrior01 5mo agoEcosia is a greenwashing front-end for Google ads. Just like how DuckDuckGo is a privacy washing front-end for Bing ads.
- dhawalhs 5mo agoI have been running a search engine for online courses for the last 15 years: https://www.classcentral.com/ https://www.classcentral.com/ The current catalog covers 100+ providers, 1000+ universities, and 250,000+ courses. Originally a weekend side project that I first shared with the world here on HN itself on Nov 29, 2011 [1]. Currently bootstrapped and profitable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288775#3289393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288775#3289393
- yakattak 5mo agoI’ve been using Kagi for over a year (maybe two?) and it’s been tremendous. I can’t recommend it enough.
- kelvinjps 5mo agoIt seems like all of them are a proxy for Google search?
- phendrenad2 5mo agoI think the anti-AI sentiment is masking a lot of other complaints with Google. For example, right now if you search for any term, and start clicking through the pages of results, you'll see links to random company websites that have nothing to do with the search term (example: search for "most famous astonauts" and on page five you might find the homepage of KFC or Nintendo). Google search is just spectacularly imploding and AI is just the visible component.
- 725686 5mo agoWhy would anybody search, when you can just ask?
- Dwedit 5mo agoUnfortunately, search results on DuckDuckGo contain AI-generated descriptions. These sometimes contain mistakes.
- yegg 5mo agoThat feature (Search Assist) can be turned off in the settings, and we have a noai.duckduckgo.com domain that automatically turns it off along with other AI features. That said, Search Assist just summarizes web content and does not generate its own answers, but the summary is AI generated.
- globalnode 5mo agoi have to use startpage since googs give me a captcha (that i refuse to complete) every time now.
- pessimizer 5mo agoWe need to bring Yahoo! back. Now that we have AI, there's all the reason to go back to directories rather than searches, especially since searches have been faked for years now, and have just become funnels. Search used to be webgrep; now the engines barely care about your query - it's just a prompt to figure out what to sell you. I remember the first time I copy-pasted something off a major website, in quotes, because I wanted to follow up on it, and got no search results. Not even from the site I copy-pasted from. "Search" has been in name only for a very long time. Build directories again.
- dartharva 5mo agoSurprising that nobody's talking about the non-AI Google - https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/ https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/
- Rekindle8090 5mo ago[dead]
- nunez 5mo agoKagi is amazing; I've been using it every day for the last three years and it's been well worth the price. I especially love that they don't shove AI in your face despite having very good AI search available (with locally hosted models!) I'm afraid of them selling out at this point. If they go, I honestly don't know who will go in their place.
- ykurtov 5mo agoKagi finances Russian war crimes through licensing Yandex's search index.
- samrus 5mo agoI imagine google is going the perplexity route, which is honestly fine by me since i do most of my searches with perplexity now. The search harness around it is good enough that i trust it to cite its sources and not go into opinion beyond necessity. If google could make it properly reliable with a good harness then i think its solid. I think this backlash against it wouldnt amount to much and people will just get on the new google
- johnea 5mo agoAlso consider mojeek: https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek
- EchoReflection 5mo ago"Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch It looks like your adblocker is attempting to interfere with the intended operation of this site. Please add us to your adblocker's allowlist. Click below for instructions." No thanks, I like ads blocked. https://web.archive.org/web/20260523024427/https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/21/six-search-engines-worth-trying-now-that-google-isnt-really-google-anymore/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260523024427/https://techcrunc...
- EchoReflection 5mo agoI've been using non-Gulag search engines for many (5+) years now. Some of my favorites are: https://freespoke.com/ https://freespoke.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ https://swisscows.com/en https://swisscows.com/en https://www.mojeek.com/ https://www.mojeek.com/ https://gibiru.com/ https://gibiru.com/ https://alchetron.com/ https://alchetron.com/ I also use Grok and Perplexity https://x.ai/ https://x.ai/ https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://www.perplexity.ai/
- dahuangf 5mo agoFor code: Kagi or phind. For general: Perplexity. For privacy: Brave. I use Google only when I need to find a specific Reddit thread now, ironically.
- bicepjai 5mo agoI don’t see anyone talking about yacy. https://github.com/yacy/yacy_search_server https://github.com/yacy/yacy_search_server I mean when we have solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious why are we still not using them to full extent. I understand it’s not easy, but this is post llm era :)
- rldjbpin 5mo agofor the non opinionated, duckduckgo with an adblocker has served me just fine for the better part of a decade. you can simply set the search as you like and save as a search url [1] that can be set in the browser once and forget. their bangs are useful to search directly in a specific site (e.g. useful workaround for reddit search results not coming anymore). when i tried kagi, i noticed that they have adopted a similar system, which has to be inspired. my overall search experience has been poor even before the GPTs, but this is just fine for almost everything. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/params https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/params
- jarek83 5mo agoOne thing with the alternative search engines is that they are mostly working fine only for English speaking western world. At least in Polish and for Polish results they do much worse than google.
- jonbarhov 5mo agoMojeek feels like a 'classic' engine as they're 100% independent with their own crawler, index and algorithms. Results aren't biased by third party indices, search history or advertising interests. Kagi is another good alternative. Google and others are racing to integrate AI but - for me - there are two hidden costs. 1. Access to the web becomes mediated and monetised even more. 2. Energy consumption up to 100x normal searches has an environmental impact.
- katuskoti 5mo agoStartpage has been great for me. Though I haven't trusted it as much since it was bought by an advertisement company (ironically named Privacy One Group). It incorporates results from both Google and Bing: https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/4522435533844-What-is-the-relationship-between-Startpage-and-your-search-partners-like-Google-and-Microsoft-Bing https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/452243553384...
- tempodox 5mo agoWhen even TechCrunch says that Google isn’t Google anymore, that’s like Mick Jagger saying you have a substance abuse problem.
- khernandezrt 5mo agoOther than the annoying wall of sponsored searched i havent had any issues with Google search results
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]