It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.

Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.

If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?

EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.

    • Z4rK@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3011·
      6 months ago

      It’s not, really, I switched from Google some years ago and had accepted my faith with DuckDuckGo, but then tried out Kagi. I use search so much daily for work, the relief of getting quality results again is immense and probably saves me hours per week. I get much better results from Kagi than I got at the end from Google, and I can tune them to my liking:

      • block Pinterest results when I search for images,
      • downprioritize shopping results,
      • rewrite all Reddit links to go to old.reddit.com,
      • unamp google AMP links
      • summarize long texts / documents
      • quick answer from the top 5 results

      …and so on and so on. It’s just so effective.

    • m_randall@sh.itjust.works
      227·
      6 months ago

      I always fear it comes across that way when I recommend it to people here. I’m just a very happy user and want to see them succeed.

      • cabbage@piefed.social
        15·
        6 months ago

        I find it expensive for what it is (given that I still get a limited number of searches) and I’m not comfortable with some of their ways (I don’t want anything to do with AI, and I the idea they have of being nonpolitical seems dangerously naive to me). I also don’t like supporting non-FOSS projects all that much.

        Still, it’s the best search I’ve found, and I’m paying every month until I find something better. It’s worth it.

        • TheMinions@lemmy.world
          22·
          6 months ago

          I know nothing about Kagi, except that it requires an account and is paid. So I assume all searches are tied to that account and there is no way to do an anonymous search.

          Disregard I’m a fool

          • Rexios@lemm.ee
            55·
            6 months ago

            We care about data protection: We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We do not log or associate searches with an account. More at our privacy policy.

            Literally the first paragraph on their website

            • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
              71·
              6 months ago

              I don’t know if I believe that. It’s a paid service, so the only way to enforce that unpaid users cannot search is to take a search request and check if it is coming from your account. Same with basic things like rate limiting requests. You literally need to associate your requests to an account to make basic functionality like this work.

              If they do this but just don’t log it, then that means there is no way for their devs to ever debug issues users have or to monitor their services. I’m highly skeptical.

              Also, “trust us” is something I’ve heard too many times.

              • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyz
                3·
                6 months ago

                They don’t need to tie the searches to an account. They log them anonymously. From their privacy policy:

                Absent from our logs are any identifying information about your client. As such, any query or traffic logging that we do cannot be tied back to your account, ensuring that Kagi developers are the only people that the logs will ever be useful to.

        • dwalin@lemmy.world
          101·
          6 months ago

          Not op, nor i have any experience with kagi, but i suspect there is no way to do an Anonymous search with kagi.

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
      131·
      6 months ago

      If I had stock/investments in a search engine, you better fucking believe Id also have a bunch of bots crawling for the terms “What is the best search engine” and immediately hijack the convo with bots upvoting my search engine.

      I cannot explain how easy it is to do this.

    • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      I’m glad I’m finally not the only one feeling this way. I’ve been seeing them aggressively pushed seemingly out of the blue for months now. Especially for what is such an awful deal and zero evidence to their claims, just citing the marketing page at face value.