Is there any good search engines? I mean I've tried searching recently for a solution I referenced 3 months ago and it's disappeared from Google and Bing.
Shit, even looking up repair information for a household appliance if can't find the model before the newest and it all points to a sale page for the newest version.
I second Kagi with the additional mention of their "lens" feature that allows results to be restricted to scholarly sources which is very relevant to the meme's search needs.
Really curious what your last say 10 non-private searches were.
Asking as I’m constantly going back to Alphabet Adware Search (!g). If I just wanted the homepages of Fortune 500 companies I could use DDG exclusively, but I look for:
forum posts
image & gif results
Lemmy results
And much more I can’t think of right now. For all of the above, I end up banging out of DDG (by adding !g) for Google. At least until I get in the habit of using SearXNG.
The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it's written by a human (LLMs).
I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.
If they'd present you with all that spam content, you wouldn't find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it's written by a human, they're going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.
So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse...
Mozilla recently announced some kind of partnership with Qwant. Hadn't heard of it before, and I was highly skeptical (I'm a very cynical person). I tried it out and honestly I think it gives me on-average better results than Google and Bing does. Since it doesn't track you it doesn't personalise the results at all, and as far as I can tell it doesn't have any ads, though I do use an adblocker so don't quote me on that. It's also very snappy. Bing often has long loading times for me, which was incredibly frustrating.
Presenting to the emergency room with hyponatremia, from hypo meaning low, natron meaning sodium, and hemia meaning presence in blood. Low sodium presence in blood !
You could probably use crystals of other elements to treat other deficiencies too, such as iron? But it's probably easier to just take an iron tablet or eat some food containing iron 😂
Same experience I have had. Swapping to scholar gets me relevant results that aren't filled with ai gibberish and backwater Hokum. Still have to be careful about study sizes and sigma values and applicability, but miles ahead for at least getting to that being my issue.
Brave uses its own index. It used to be supplemented with results from other engines but I believe they have now phased that out.
Brave is the best of the free options in my experience, and it supports "bangs" which let's you send your querry to a different engine (typing "how far is it to the sun !g" will pass the search to google. Duckduckgo also supports bangs), this is especially helpful for image searches (!gi for google images) since braves image search sucks dogshit 😅
Quant seemed like the second best free option in my experience. Some people don't like brave as a company for various reasons, so quant may be a good option for those folks. Its my understanding that Mozilla has worked with quant in some way, which is kinda neat.
Both have their own index making them a sustainable/viable option going forward, where meta search engines that use other engine's results are at the whim of those they fetch the results from (but may provide better results by piggybacking off a larger successful engine)
Thank you for the corrections! I’ve updated the post. I agree that Brave search had the best results/UX. As you mentioned, I have my own moral qualms with brave as a company.
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users' privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO 'SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge' and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer's own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
[...] you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use "OPEN ANONYMOUSLY"; this also affects the following links.
Perplexity, well, is still one of the more private AI, but best to use the extension which works well and anonymous (logs only tech data), Chromium only. In Firefox you can use perplexity only as search engine from the website itself.
I'm not sure what exactly you're typing into the search field, but I don't anything like this. The top 3 sites I get for a search of "minerals" are wikipedia, australian museum, and britannica. Typing in "crystals" gets me a healthline article debunking crystal healing, but the following results are some woman's personal store and amazon. Lastly, being direct about wanting scientific articles gets me said articles...
Side note: Why are there so many people pushing for kagi in this thread and skipping over the fact that duckduckgo exists? It's kinda bizarre to see.
I’ve commented about potential Kagi astroturfing here before.
Seems likely to me.
Their trial - too short for me - felt like a private Google w/improvements.
Now, as a filthy freeloader, my default is DuckDuckGo. I am dissatisfied with the results and !bang out to Google (!g) about half the time. I pray DDG makes use of this data to improve their engine.
tl;dr astroturfing vs. bad results vs. enabling the king of adware
Google results are different for everyone by design. Results vary per person because of assumptions made about what you'd like to see. I believe the term is filter bubbles.
Idk if anything has changed since but a high school teacher showed us this in a computer lab. She gave us an exact phrase to type in and we all compared search results. They were similar enough to be useful but had significant differences in what the first page showed. And we weren't even signed in to our school accounts, when we did it was even worse.
God I had this issue looking for used wheels for my car. Like, actual wheels to use for a track day, but results showed nothing but simracing threads for used STEERING wheels.