google search results are still kind of useful especially for non-english language queries, anyone knows a good alternative?
searxng also doesn't really seem to work these days..
SearXNG works flawlessly....
literally whoogle
Not the same but you can use a terminal browser like lynx, links2, w3m, or browsh and pipe the output wherever you want. Similarly you can force standard browsers to run in an html only mode.
google killed the ability to search in js-disabled browsers like those
It’s not much of a loss because google search results are shit anyway.
What's your choice search engine?
Kagi
I'll check it out. Any opinion of it over something like duckduckgo?
It usually has better results. The features alone, however, put it above DDG.
Rankings aren't static. You can block a site, pin it to the top of results, or just derank/promote it.
Want to redirect a domain? You can do that.
Want to see specific results? Like PDFs only, or maybe just small web, educational, news stories, forums, or whatever? Use a lens!
Love AI summaries? You can use them! Hate AI summaries? Don't worry, they're off by default and require you to press the small "Summarize" button.
You probably understand bangs, right? Using !w will search Wikipedia. You probably also know that some sites, such as Reddit, have shit results so using !r would be worthless. Kagi supports bangs but also has what they call "snaps" - if you type @w, it will be replaced with site:wikipedia.com.
Oh, yeah, one more thing. No ads. There are no risks of misaligned interests between you, Kagi, and their advertisers.
Misaligned interests is ironically the main reason i don't use them.
Nice, I do a lot of this through other means. Like my taskbar is set up for ! notation. Thanks for the information. I'll definitely give it a try.
I like lens feature a lot. I also use their privacy pass feature quite a bit. Overall there are a lot of really nice features and search results as good or better than Google. DDG uses bing which is junk IMO
Mostly Qwant, occasionally ddg, mojeek and others, including my own instance of SearxNG (google doesn’t respond to it most of the time).
Thanks to enshittification of google, there is not much difference between it and other search engines so being unable to use it via alternative frontends doesn’t make that much of a dofferencd.
I should probably use searxng more often…
Thanks, I'll check it out.. I mainly use ddg currently..
Duckduckgo is surprisingly okay, even with non-english queries by using the region selector (your experience may vary)
ddg is my primary right now, it absolutely sucks for korean queries sadly
The modern internet is getting filthier by the day. Gone are the days where independent software used to be a thing I suppose.
This might be one of those things where self hosting isn't worth the pain, like email.
I've been using Kagi for several years now and have been very happy with it.
They are literally giving part of your subscription fee to fucking Russia. In comparison, DuckDuckGo have ended their partnership with Yandex. Vlads refusal to follow suit and his steadfast support of Yandex is quite telling to say the least.
Yet another part of your subscription goes to Elon Musks xAI to support Grok in their AI assistant. Even if you are not using that model, all paying users are effectively subsidizing the cost of the Grok API calls. You can't opt out of that.
"internet indexer" should really be a government / EU / UN sponsored public utility thing. And then you have front ends that can improve the search query and filter and sort the results.
I don't know how much it would cost / how large a data center it would take to cache the web pages like google does. But there is just no reason to have so much wealth / advertising drain from the public for such a fundamental thing.
searxng also doesn't really seem to work these days..
Of note, this depends on the instance. I occasionally hop between public instances whenever one is no longer reliable. Google and friends are blocking requests from SearXNG instances because it is in their business interests to kill competition
As for alternatives, I would avoid DDG since they seem to be going a similar route as Google with a front page filled with ads and the emphasis towards their chatbot is not to my taste. Plus, DDG is hosted in the U.S., so privacy-wise it's not as good. Startpage was purchased by an American advertising company some time ago, which isn't great. Brave Search is also one, but they are doing some shady things on their browser with crypto and whatnot, so I don't particularly trust them. Plus, they are an American for-profit.
Qwant and Ecosia are solid options, the former is a French for-profit and the latter a German non-profit, and they are working towards an independent European search index that is being trialled in France! Both are quite good, Qwant is shinier and magical blue, while Ecosia is simpler and earthy green.
Ecosia also uses a portion of their revenue for planting trees, which is really neat, and they are super transparent about where their earnings go!
I personally use a mix of SearXNG and Ecosia, and I sometimes use Qwant too for certain queries.
Ecosia also has an LLM which make little sense with their mission IMO
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