What search engines are you using?

I have been using Kagi for 6 months now, and really enjoy its clean interface and relevant results. Being able to boost the ranking of relevant domains and downgrade the low-quality ones is a game-changer!

To remove pinterest and slackoverflow mirrors from all search engines, I use https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results

Brave search, which tries to pull in Discussions results, vs Google who originally had a fantastic discussion search feature, but it was killed to optimize the Ads business.

Brave has been better than DDG, and the only reason I use Google now is product & price search. Google’s shopping / product search is still unmatched for price comparison and retailer discovery, given many companies feed inventory data to Google for Ads.

I've been using Neeva [0] for a few months now. I'm paying for their Premium plan because I want to support alternatives to Google. A few times when I noticed bugs with Neeva I would contact them and surprise surprise a human would actually reply and we'd chat about the issue, and it'd get fixed in a week or so.

Before Neeva I'd been using DDG but with DDG I'd frequently find myself going back to Google for complex searches. So far with Neeva I haven't had to resort to Google almost ever.

I hadn't heard of Kagi until I saw this thread, but it seems Kagi and Neeva are competing in the same space. Neeva has a cheaper premium plan. I'm curious if anyone has tried both and what they see as the main differences.

[0]: https://neeva.com/

Google. I haven't spent much time with the others.

I use "reddit" a lot. I wish there was an option to only get results from private individuals on any site.

There's a big problem with sites that scrape content from other sites. They're named fiiwebbcjiriebdbjfjeb and the like, and aggregate crap. If you click them the actual page has nothing to do with the preview and is some kind of scam.

Sometimes they seem to have exactly what I was looking for but I can't find where it came from, and the site is just a preview plus a scam. I wonder if some are using GPT3 rather than scraping.

There's also a problem with less dishonest scraping sites that ate just annoying. Like those sites that make a summary landing page from a github repo and don't actually add much value. They just clog up results.

And of course, pintrest, which only has the thing you clicked on about half the time and yet seems very popular.

Google :)

It's fast and convenient, but there's no free lunch - one pays with personal data - Google always tries to pretend the concept of privacy doesn't exist.

DuckDuckGo but it's just Bing and the results suck.

Sometimes there's something I know exists and DDG can't find it, but Google does instantly. I'm considering switching back to G.

I like Kagi. I found that DDG is really bad and often resorted to !g; but I gave Kagi a shot, and it's become my main engine.

https://search.brave.com/

I've been loving it

Former journalist here. DDG Lite is my browser start page. In reality, though, "!g keyword" or even "!g keyword site:somesite.com" is still the most common query. Old habits die hard. Strangely, though, I have no problem using DDG on a console-only Linux system (with a text-only browser).

I complained about the degradation of Google's search results in a previous thread. Thankfully, a fellow HNer shared some really useful tricks to improve googling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519252

In conclusion, adding "inurl:" and "intext:" parameters have really been a game changer -- to the better -- for me. I'm a fan of old-time, text-heavy Internet, for which phpBB-style forums are a goldmine. So "inurl:viewthread" or "inurl:viewtopic" is my most preferred way to make browsing fun again.

As just some guy from the countryside, I'm afraid of the sheer "mass" of Google as a company, all that surveillance capitalism, UI bloat, etc. Dislike the search results prioritizing they do. But, well, in practice, "inurl:" and "intext:" do work fairly well.

I also have a list of favorite knowledge-base style websites, databases, etc, for which I aim to write simple custom searching scripts, and combine the results in the end. Something like Julian Assange's Surfraw, only much simpler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfraw

I'm not using any search engines. Trying to browse the web using a combination of organically discovered links, portals, bookmarks and history. I'll want to write a plugin in the future that automatically caches the pages I visit, so I can have a local search engine of everything I ever visited.

Sometimes I use Wikipedia or Wiktionary to find generic terms.

That said... sometimes it doesn't work, and I have to cheat using DDG.

Currently testing out spot which was forked from searx:

https://spot.ecloud.global

https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/infra/spot

I've been trying https://you.com/. The UI can be a bit confusing, which is owed to the fact that they are actually trying something new.

I’ve tried Ecosia, I want to use it, but the results are really hit or miss. Basic stuff, sure, but when you’re actually digging for info it falls short. I’m back at google but I wish I had found an alternative.

Face the same problem you're facing. Our small team at PsyTech believes that your problem isn;t really with Search, as much with Discovery. You should be able to fetch content on a pull basis without plugging in keywords into an input box everytime.

To solve all of this, we are trying to build mutter, as a better way to curate for everyone. Please do try it out and share your feedback@psytech.ai, and hopefully you won't have to Search again :)

https://mutter.cards

TS

I made my own experimental search engine by scraping the edu domains on DMOZ, using an algorithm to summarize the most relevant paragraphs on each page, and then ordering the results by relevance. It is useful for finding experts and academic departments or programs: https://www.locserendipity.com/edu.html

Kagi almost exclusively.

Because they regard privacy as important am using Qwant https://www.qwant.com/ and Ecosia https://www.ecosia.org/

I use Google. It’s still the best. Overdoing it a bit on the ads, but they’re pretty easy to ignore.

you.com CEO here.

We are seeing a lot of growth and retention with developers on https://you.com/code You can vote on which search-apps you like and soon block or pin them completely. You will also be able to submit your own search-apps soon. We believe in an open platform for search.

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

DDG except when I need to run a simple math "query" that somehow only Google allows to process (mostly when budgeting, 1+1+1+1+1= - DDG doesn't do anything, Google executes)

Not a search engine but pretty often I will ask GPT-3 a question now if it's not easily googled. Often gives the initial context to Google follow up questions.

I used duckduckgo for quite a long time until they proved to everyone they cant be trusted.

Went over to searx, but recently I was getting lots of empty results because they got banned or something.

Currently at Brave.

Whoogle It's self hosted, and just forwards to Google. But, it's HTML only, with tons of options, and minimizes tracking. It even has an option to route through Tor!

Google. When I cannot find what I'm looking for, then Yandex (feels like using Google in 2006: little restrictions, no uncensored content)

I use Google, and I have a shortcut set up to append things to my search, like "-site:annoyingthinggthatalwayscomesupbeforetherealdocs.com"

LibreX

https://github.com/hnhx/librex/

I’ve been appreciating kagi mostly recently, that and DuckDuckGo are the only ones I currently use.

The apple springboard one - it is location aware enough. I use it the most. Otherwise it's ddg.

Qwant (Lite): I find it works best for French results, but it works pretty good for English as well.

Yandex feels like google classic.

DuckDuckGo, but I've gotten into the habit of !g almost all queries :(

Brave search: search.brave.com Occasionally ddg. Rarely google

Qwant, DDG, Brave and Mojeek.

EBG (Everything but Google)

shodan ;)

* https://www.shodan.io/

Searx.be