First of all google went to shit, but duckduckgo has been disappointing me too.
I moved to searx and it was decent but confused me a bit and not always reliable.
But the single biggest problem on the internet for me… The yt search bar. My god I fucking hate it with a passion. It just doesn’t do what its supposed to, its not searching anything at all. Ive literally tried and written every word of the video title plus the channel name and it didnt show up bc I put onen word in the wrong spot.
Its not usable. 90% of the time I’m getting random Indian videos with nothing to do woth my search, shorts (which I blocked in revanced so thats fine now) and people also watch or recommended videos from my user profile.
I switched to Kagi a year ago. It’s free for first hundred searches so you can see what it’s like. If you like it you can pay for it. I know paying for a search Engine is very niche, but I use my search Engine for both work and personal, it’s a tool and frankly you’ve already hit the nail on the the head with everything else just being shit. Between rubbish results and poor privacy, I really am happy that I have Kagi as an option. The price per year ain’t bad for how much I use it and I’m happy my money is going to devs rather that aren’t selling my data
Anyone using Mojeek?
Their about page: https://www.mojeek.com/about/
Heard of it, havent yet tried it
I guess it’s not surprising that this is also a google thing, but gmail’s. No matter what I type in it shows me my entire inbox practically. It’s so fuzzy it’s completely useless.
Github. The
/key is usually a shortcut in Firefox (and many other software) for search. But they hijacked it to their search-field that requires you to be logged in anyway. So you can only use ctrl+f on their site.For websearch I’ve switched to Kagi and it does exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less.
Discourse
Amazon
I’ve never gone to a website and searched for socks and been shown bicycles before.
Agreed, which I know is on purpose trying to get you to spend more time on the site and see more things that could be impulse buys.
Used to be Reddit’s.
These days, it’s Google’s.
Honestly, at this point Reddit’s search doesn’t even really feel worse than the competition. Its terrible at fuzzy searches, yes, but the fact that it has functioning search operators that it consistantly respects is so useful. Being able to search “(add OR insert OR update) AND (rest OR restful) NOT sql” is so useful.
Of course, a good fuzzy search would also be great, but no one offers that anymore, so…
when i want to search for specific things on reddits search bar, it kinda “hallucinate searches” totally unrelated to what you want.
Try using the title:() operator. For example, title:(warrior OR knight). It can also be combined with others, like title:(sale) OR flair:(offering). I’m sure theres also options for content and metadata, but I don’t know them off the top of my head.
I haven’t used google in 3-4 years. Is it even worse now?
In the last two years it became extremely bad at actually searching what you typed, and not what ‘ai’ interpreted as what you actually want to see.
It’s been going pretty steadily downhill for about 10 years now, but with the addition of the AI bullshit on top of the other SEO issues, it’s basically useless now.
Ah. Even duckduckgo added ai.
Plus they dont use the best models which makes it even worse
There’s at least has an easily acceptable option to disable it
Yeah but only if you keep cookies enabled. The default Librewolf settings has the bullshit AI come back every time, so its still somewhat of a pain.
Iirc DDG had a feature that allowed you to save its settings without cookies as a url. So you might be able to bookmark it with ai disabled and then it should also work in Librewolf
It’s a stable target ar least, Ublock Origin and filter like:
Reddit is the first one that comes to mind for me, too. It was always easier to use a search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo and do
thing I'm looking for site:reddit.cominstead of actually using Reddit’s search feature.
I work in ecommerce, so the answer is “ours”. I get far too many calls saying “Do you sell x”, or “How much is y”, and because of how terrible our website’s search function is, I can’t just say “use the fucking website, that’s what it’s there for” like I desperately want to.
In addition to what you mentioned, another really annoying thing about Youtube’s search is that it sometimes gives totally different results from one minute to the next. You can search for something, then type those exact same words just a few seconds later, and you get a completely different list of videos. So if you ever do get a list of good results, you need to leave that browser tab alone and open a new one to keep those results “safe.”
And even though you typed the exact title of the video you are searching for, it will never be the first result…
Damn, I too went to this same route of Google -> duckduckgo -> Searx. While it is true searx is unreliable at times, if you enable more engines and find an instance that has anti botting features, it should be pretty solid
What instance are you using?
Not the person you replied to, but: my own on my server. Con: I have to do the administration. Pro: I started using it, noted my preferred default settings and just set those as a server side default where possible. Also I have full control over which engines are enabled per default and which are available generally.
Took me a bit to tweak it, though.
That’s really cool. Very daunting a task to go through with
Assuming you do have a place to host it (even at home on your PC, or an old PC, not necessarily reachable from the internet), and assuming you know a bit about docker, it’s quite easy actually.
Where it all started for me: https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker
Note that the example above in the beginner variant uses Caddy as a webserver which - by default - assumes you’re running it on a server that can be publicly reached from the internet and won’t start up correctly otherwise - e.g. at home - unless you change some config.
Damn, is it actually Eivith? Thanks for all the support help in the Matrix chat
Yes, im in the Matrix chat - thanks!
There are 2 instances that use anti bot features that I could find. That is https://search.canine.tools/ and https://search.fredix.xyz/
Personally, the fastest and most reliable in my opinion are https://priv.au/ and https://searx.tiekoetter.com/ I used to use Tiekoetter’s instance for nearly a year before I hosted my own. Otherwise I would recommend checking here: https://searx.space/
With that said, I still didn’t answer your question, because I am hosting my own instance, but I would not recommend joining unless you really want to. I’m going to move it to central Europe, it’s currently hosted in Romania.
Self hosters impress me. Thanks for the recommendations, I’ve been confused about what to try for a while
I currently hate all search engines. If I have to type reddit at the end of every search, it is not really a search engine.
I don’t know about Google, but DuckDuckGo sometimes even shows completely opposite things, even when I write Reddit at the end… finding something very specific or niche is a challenge.
I am confused as to how do they make a good service worse?
In the case of google they purposely made it worse so that people spent more time on their site rather than other sites. This means they see more ads from google as opposed to ads on another website. They’ve just doubled down on this with AI summaries, too. Now they just blatantly take content from websites so you don’t have to go to the website that made it at all.
It’s getting to the point where it’s better to just straight up ask Claude, not gonna lie.
with a passion. It just doesn’t do what its supposed to, its not searching anything at all. Ive literally tried and written every word of the video title plus the channel name and it didnt show up bc I put onen word in the wrong spot.
If you want to just treat each search term independently, that works for me. Searching for battle of the solomons eastern has a top hit of “Battle of the Eastern Solomons”.
