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.

  • chirospasm
    7•11 months ago

    Even though there’s a small monthly cost, the results have been consistent for Kagi. But consistency meets only half of my needs for search: I also want to make decisions quickly from what I find within the contents. If I were to to go to a link, wait for it to load, scroll the content, etc. – does that listed forum post have the answer I am looking for? Does this news article cover the nuances I have been tracking and would like to read more of? Kagi offers an AI-based summarize feature that helps. And that’s been meeting the other half of my needs, as well.

    EDIT, an opinion: Search services may well be eventually replaced by small, niche LLMs trained to perform summerization tasks, such as Consensus, which I have used for work research, and Perplexity.ai. The AI summarize feature of Kagi is why I see the service as more useful than straight indexes, even when self-hosted. Kagi is a stepping stone toward this for me, and why I recommend it.

    • @xbit00@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      1•11 months ago

      The ability to summarize pages directly on the search results page is a big win for me. I also use the kagi summarizer several times a day to summarize youtube videos that I’m interested in but don’t want to sit through the whole video.

      • @wahmingEnglish
        6•11 months ago

        How WOULD you differentiate bots from happy users, anyway? They certainly look like organic accounts to me

      • @DrFuggles@feddit.de
        6•11 months ago

        A 7 months old random fediverse account is a bot? You know that the entirety of the fediverse is like 0.001 percent of the user base of the social media giants?

        That would be money really badly spent on astro-turfing bots.

        • 𝐘Ⓞz҉
          -2•11 months ago

          Ooooh that’s crazy. Why are people not joining fediverse ? I think we need some marketing people to band together and create easy guides on how to sign up and share it on Facebook, YouTube etc