Was using 4get for a while but the instance seems to be broken, gonna try ecosia out for a while.
Abandon search engines, normalize asking your cousins your questions again
This is how everyone learned games like The Floor is Lava
Library help desk
complicated for usa people though
Unless something has changed, that chart is incorrect. I stopped using startpage earlier this year when they announced the inclusion of ai.
Every single search provider mentioned includes AI as an option. Fortunately, they all gave an option to just turn it off. It's annoying, but if they find that users want these AI summaries, they need to add them as an option to compete.
I wish more of them just had an option to highlight excerpts from pages or Wikipedia articles like google used to do exclusively. But I'm sure that harder to build :/
Do users actually want such AI summaries? Is there any good polling on this?
I mostly read about people being annoyed by companies pushing hard for AI, and trying to get rid of those unrequested summaries.
tuta seem to have missed the mark then, incorrect details and not including noai.duckduckgo
turning ai off is a valid (and welcome) choice, but most people don't look at settings, the default is often ai on, and updates can also change them.
in Firefox browsers and its forks:
but then in a different part of settings:
the ai setting there was defaulted to on, even with ai supposedly completely turned off in the main ai section
So I would rather use a search engine (and browser) with the default that ai is trash.
Been paying for Kagi, i’m enjoying it
Kagi is really good, particularly with Kagi assistant. Worth the money
Honestly, Kagi is crushing it. Their search results are so quality that family members of mine have agreed it is better than google. I never thought I'd pay for search but now am honestly glad I do.
Mojeek ?
🖐🏻I using Mojeek.
Me too, via MetaGer, which lets me combine Mojeek and Brave search results.
Hello. That connection thing is cool. So I have no experience with meta-search engines. I gave up on Brave after I learned that it's hosted on AWS. My only search engine is Mojeek because it's not hosted on big tech like, Azure AWS, or Google Cloud.
I've used DDG for years and really like it. I like it even more now that I've been using #emacs more because they have a text-based, or at least non-js, search page that works well in eww.
Also appreciate the Lite/HTML approach of ddg for quick searches on the phone. Much faster and lean.
Qwant used to have one too but it's been scrapped somehow
Ecosia all the way, search plus the right mission
Also building an independent search index together with Qwant - already serving the French and German users. In their way to to drop Google and Bing
I liked startpage until it broke for my setup, it does not work well with proxy’s, VPN and AdBlock. DuckDuckGo is my go to engine. Maybe in the near future I will setup searx. Also , in Germany there is ecosia but it also broke because of my setup.
Searx is not the easy one. Many instances don't work, and the working ones hardly show relevant results.
Yeah I have not enjoyed it
Self-hosted isn't as unstable because you don't end up getting blocked by throttling as often if you're the only user. Public instances tend to get hammered by bots and LLMs these days. Just put it behind a reverse proxy with a login or a VPN to keep others out. I use keycloak SSO in Traefik on a VPS, but pangolin works well for my web apps in my home. That said, it requires setup and maintenance. But no tracking since you own the server.
But TBH no generalized search engines are really good these days. They all mostly all overrun either by monetization schemes and ads or have been manipulated by SEO, so rarely give good results. I've been exploring lots of alternatives, but not many are any good.
What do you mean no tracking since you own your own server? If you use it alone, there is a straightforward correlation between the requests from your searxng instance and you, the dude who hosts it. The idea of searxng is that requests of many people become mixed together through an instance
Yes, but no identification to tie that to. Sure they know the things some individual happens to search for, but they don't have my google login or advertising ID or Facebook token or any other tracking tokens to link those requests to my identity outside of that silo of the IP address, and that changes as it's sent over an anonymizing proxy. It's not perfect and if they really tried they could probably track it down, but it's rare enough and enough obfuscation that I doubt they'd care enough to do it.
It used to be amazing, but lately the providers seem to have started fighting it. It’s take a while to get it setup correctly, especially if you want not only US results.
Brave search was surprisingly good, like google when it wasn't shit.
I could never trust Brave. You can’t be a search or browser company and also run an ad network. It’s a conflict of interest.
I sometimes use that Marginalia search.
xprivo?Based in Luxie.
I've been using Qwant and it's really good, I think it's better than DDG, at least for results in Italian
What do you use to replace the Google's Image search?
That is the area that I found more challenge.
Tineye, lenso.ai, picfinder? I’ve heard maybe Bing is better than Google now, but I don’t know.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)