I have switched many times over the years and nothing has ever come close to google search. However, due to the recent massive decline in google search quality I am trying out kagi, with actually great success. I am still debating if I should pay for access once my trial ends, but more for budget reasons than for quality reasons. If it were free, I would not hesitate to switch.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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I've been paying for Kagi for a couple months now. Now that it's $10 for unlimited searches I'll probably keep it up for a while. I do tend to get really good results. Its the first thing on the chopping block next time I need to tighten my budget though.
Before Kagi I was using DDG, but had to use bangs a lot because I couldn't surface what I was looking for.
I’m liking all the comments saying that [even despite its strong decline in quality], Google’s results are still much better than others’. I’ve been moving around a lot to other search engines lately and thought I’ve been doing something wrong.
Better to De-Google sooner rather than later imho and it's fairly safe to assume corporate greed will continue to send it's products and services deeper into the abyss. I think using alternatives now will make life easier in the future as Google becomes less useful with each passing day. Also, just using Google gives them access to personal data to harvest and ad revenue. I think we should try to be conscientious consumers whenever possible and use less evil alternatives. I don't want to support Google's enshitification of the Internet, censorship, anti-competitive practices, etc...
Kagi is pretty expensive for my country's standards, sadly
Yeah 120€ per year ouch
Similar for me, there's just absolutely no comparison to Google so far. DDG is the closest but the results are still a fair bit worse and importantly, I'll always have to swap to Google for maps anyways as Apple Maps is just an insult to users.
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I have been using duckduckgo. I personally think it's pretty good. So much so, that I think I have used it for 10 years now.
Same here, but it has also gone bad IMO.
Guess all the fake sites really got em all this time.
Browser: Firefox because I can download its source code, use it, inspect, modify and share. All of these 4 freedoms make Firefox free, as in freedom. ~~Brave is non-free (closed source and not contributing to software freedom)~~.
I use Qwant (unfortunately, it only works in the EU) and site-local search (Wikipedia, ArchWiki, etc.)
All web search engines are crap, honestly. Maybe Kagi makes better, idk.
EDIT: Brave is free, apparently.
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Kagi! Worth every penny of the subscription. The emphasis on privacy is a big deal for me but the killer feature is the ability to customize results. I have sites I personally like/trust towards the top and have an ever growing blacklist of sites that don't get shown at all. No more pinterest, spruce, or other seo spam sites!
I tried for years to breakup with Google search, but always kept coming back to it for one reason or another. I started using Kagi a few months ago and have not even thought about Google since then. I really can’t recommend it enough, especially now that the $10/month plan is unlimited searches.
Good to hear that they updated their model
But doesn't that naturally just recreate an even more personalised and hence affirming echo chamber the like of the algorithms on Google or Bing or so usually do?
Granted, plenty Spam sites to exclude, but is it easy to keep it to just those?
This is an interesting observation, not really something I have considered. The key difference here is that you are the one in control of those customizations. Whether the customizations are useful or harmful is entirely up to the user, Kagi just gives you the option.
For me at least, the majority of my searches I just want the correct answer to a question or a link to a specific resource I'm looking for. I don't really use it as a content discovery engine. Being able to prioritize sites that I have found through experience to have reliable results and exclude sites that are uninformative or irritating is valuable.
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Kagi is great
Your question seems to be confusing between browser and search engine. These are two separate pieces of software.
But to answer both:
- Browser: Firefox. Google has demonstrated clearly that they cannot be trusted as the sole owner of the web which is what is about to happen as Chromium (which Brave is based on) fully takes over. Mozilla (makers of Firefox) is the last holdout. If you care, this is case in point about how Google having a monopoly on browsers will kill the free web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity.
- Search engine: Another +1 for Kagi. It has completely replaced Google for me.
I personally use Ecosia, it's got a pretty decent privacy policy (esp compared to google/microsoft) and it uses Bing's index so the results are pretty good. The main selling point is they use 100% of their profits for planting trees. The quality of the results is 99% of the time fine but if I ever get something I can't find (or if I'm doing an image search) you can just add #g to your search to search google.
It's overall a pretty good search engine by itself, but the fact it plants trees pushes it leagues ahead of the others for me
Do you run an adblocker?
edit: because if you do, then your searches don't contribute towards the tree planting
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SearXNG. It'll search all the other engines for you, in a privacy preserving way.
Caveat that it is only privacy preserving if you trust whoever is hosting it.
The solution to that is to host it yourself. A VPS with 2GB RAM would be would be more than sufficient for SearxNG, and you can often find those for around $15/year (see GreenCloudVPS budget KVM line, RackNerd sales, other hosts on LowEndTalk). Or, you could run it on a Raspberry Pi, especially now that Raspberry Pis are more accessible and not out of stock everywhere.
Be careful though. Self hosting is addictive. You start with one service on a low-end VPS or Raspberry Pi, then you outgrow the server, expand, and eventually end up in [email protected] with a full-size server rack in your house.
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I use startpage which is a google proxy. So, it does what duckduckgo does with bing but with google instead. Searx is also a great option. Neither have their own crawler though
As for the brave engine there's nothing inherently wrong with it. In fact, I'd argue it's much safer than google, bing, or the proxies of each. While proxying you can still be fingerprinted. With brave only brave could do that and I trust them not to more than most.
You should be cautious though, as brave has had some privacy issues before injecting affiliate links which would track you when going to ecommerce sites.
Of course, the brave CEO is a piece of shit though. Full on covid conspiracy lab made Fauci plandemic ivermectin type stuff, believes that gay marriage should be illegal while donating to anti-gay orgs, and otherwise uses his position to further far right ideas. He also tries to fund weird micro nation projects with the goal of creating anarcho-capitalist heavens in the ocean. Think bioshock, but crypto bro. All around weird guy
All this said, I'd still argue from a privacy perspective brave is a perfectly reasonable option. The company has one privacy controversy but that's better than the big two. I'll stick to startpage though for political reasons, until I find something with good enough results that's fully independent and moral. Currently looking at mojeek myself
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I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a while now, and while it works great for searches in English, I’ve had some problems with my native language (Finnish). However, with the use of bangs, this downside can be mitigated.
It was an great moment when I learned that bangs exist. I only use two or three but it's still amazing.
Search engine or browser? For browsers I’ll use Firefox, but if I’m logging into anything I’ll usually use Chrome or Safari. I’ll also use Tor browser sometimes.
On the search engine side, I’ll generally use DuckDuckGo but I’m trying out Kagi to see if it’s worth paying for.
I'm another Kagi fan - after customising it a little it's just so good, and I haven't even played with features like lenses.
I really like the custom bang searches (e.g. I could make !ks gravity search on simple Wikipedia), especially on mobile since Firefox Android doesn't support the normal browser quicksearches (where you set a keyword for each search).
Any love for qwant?
4get.ca, it's a metasearch engine, you can use it to get results from different search engines without trackers and anonymously
Startpage (google results) or duckduckgo (but it contains a few Microsoft trackers)
Google's localization is much better than any search engines I've tried.
For work I still use Google tbh. It's still really good for technical answers
For any given query, if you're not satisfied with the first results out of one search engine, try two competing ones. Next time you have a search, begin with whatever one did the best on your previous search. Iterate. Record and publish your results.
Folks were unsatisfied with AltaVista and Lycos; that's how Google won for a while. At one point, Yahoo stood for "You Always Have Other Options". You still do.
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