this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology

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What's your opinion? Does google really "not work" anymore? Are there any better search engines? Why did the quality of search results go down? I honestly stumbled onto this question through this music video, what is ironic in it's own way i feel...

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Exactly, I've noticed this over the past few months, actual relevant results are being pushed much further down the stack.

If you want to explore alternatives, I've been using SearXNG, a so-called "metasearch engine", where you can get a combination of various search engine results, based on your preferences. It's pretty good, when it works (it tends to get rate-limited fairly often... or at least some of its results / search engines do, which can get annoying).

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Self-hoster of a searxNG here. With docker, your can spin your own in 1 minute top. I'll never go back to any other search engine, this is the best (imho).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can also selfhost SearxNG with modest hardware and side step the rate limits. I love it. Happy to answer any questions

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How does it compare to Kagi?

I can't self host it, what's the problem with using an existing instance?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I haven't used Kagi much, but my understanding is that Kagi has their own indexing and you can customize your search by ranking your results.

SearxNG runs searches against many other search engines and then uses an algorithm to rank the results sanely. So less customizable but also the net you're casting is much wider.

You could easily self host on a free-tier instance in Oracle cloud or AWS for a year, or even just run it on a laptop. But if you really can't see a way to do that you can of course use one of the listed instances, you'll just be more likely to bump up against rate limits since you're sharing limits with many other people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Just set this up on my Unraid server and it's amazing. Great suggestion and thank you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

These days I often just skip the first 2 pages and go straight to page 3 for my search results to be able to find anything slightly resembling what I searched for.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Bookmarking this for later. Thanks for this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just to help me understand: Why is it that when I try the same search on different instances of this, I get very different search results?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This would depend on the search engines enabled and/or the default language/country set (if any) for that particular instance, you can find those in the settings of the instance itself (and enable/disable whichever you're most interested in, as well as a few other relevant settings).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Woah thank you for this!!