I’ve been using DuckDuck Go since leaving Google Search, but that seems to be the first step away. I’m not keen on their AI assist. I tried Start Page, but the first four results were ads. I don’t mind paying a small fee for good search. So Brave Search or Kagi?
4get
Swisscows.com, searxNG (federated)
I am a kagi user on the $5 plan and love it.
I tried Kagi because I was excited by the hype and would gladly pay a fee for superior search thats not google. But, my experience wasn’t great:
- Couldn’t reliably give me local results. E.g., searching for “pizza near me” would render results from a combination of my local city, Sydney and those in Singapore.
- UI needs some basic improvements. Rules of font spacing for starters.
- It was slow. like at least 500 ms for me to get a page of results, even though I was pretty sure it was using my closest AWS region.
I hope this doesn’t come off as too negative–I don’t want to be disparaging. Contrarily, I would love to hear your thoughts as a supporter of the platform. It could be that I was using it wrong, or theres some mitigating features that I missed. As I said, I would gladly pay to not be the product.
Degoogling comes with sacrifices.
Absolutely Kagi. Its worth the small fee and has so KANU useful features that make combing through the bullshit way easier. We use it daily.
What a nice thread!
I add here https://www.ecosia.org/
I’m sticking with DDG, it’s not perfect but still better than Google
Searx has been excellent for me, but it’s not the best option if you want to search by date relevancy. I’ll find that I combine DDG and Searx mostly because of this.
You can just enable ddg within the searxng instance
If you don’t mind keeping a cookie around, DDG has search settings that let you turn off AI Assist and advertisements.
It’s funny I was literally just posting about my search setup today lol. So that’s all what I use, if any of that works.
I’m glad for this thread because I use duck duck Go but I hate it. Become trash in the last year.
searxng or metasearxng is yhe way to go imo
SearXNG is good. If you’re not self-hosting, make sure to have a shortlist of alternative instances. I like instances that pull from google, but those also tend to suffer from rate-limiting.
What is your goto instance? I use https://searx.foss.family/
It’s a toss-up between opnxng.com, priv.au, and searx.tiekoetter.com for me since they all don’t have perfect uptimes. I have a bias for ones with shorter URLs and sometimes I wonder if other people do too.
Try Mojeek. I don’t like, at all, that it’s based in the UK, but at least it’s not Gringoland. Easy-to-use, own web index, truly independent company with own ad syndication (no Bing).
ononoki , or any other free instance of searxng on the web.
Have you tried adding the no AI version of Duckduckgo to your browser search options? I believe it’s just adding “https://noai.duckduckgo.com/”.
It’s definitely been a QOL improvement for me.
Nice!!!
I did it a week ago and it’s been great not having that AI summary at the top. I don’t know if this also disregards AI for image searches as there seemed to be an additional fix for that.
