What is your replacement for Google search

I pay for Kagi.com

I switched from ddg which I did ASAP whenever that was. People seem to forget that Google's heyday at search was during a period where they proudly had no business model beyond better search. The response to what is the business model question I believe was "do no evil".

I haven't used Google for search for years personally and professionally. I first switched to DDG and at first found I would fall back to Google, but as I learnt the tool and time went on I slowly stopped falling back to Google search. I now pay for Kagi and love it and would say it has now been at least 18 months since I used Google search with intention on my devices. However, there are times when I have to use a device or system that is not mine and I need to use search, Google is default, and I use it to get the job done. I no longer enjoy the experience, I don't miss using it, there are a lot of ads, and the results are definitely no better and harder to pick it out.

I'm really confused as to why people still state Google as the standard to beat. IMO, that's no longer true.

DuckDuckGo has been my daily driver for several years. I use bangs ({search query} !g/!yt/!reddit) to quickly get to Google/Youtube/reddit etc results. Thus far, I have not noticed any significant change in my search experience.

I pay for https://kagi.com - it's absolutely perfect.

Edit: I should explain why - a) you search for something, you find that thing. This should be table stakes for a search engine, but it's just not true of any of the others any more. b) No ads, no tracking. c) The lenses are excellent, mine defaults to the programming one a lot and the results are consistently great. d) You can up/down rank or block specific sites! Bye bye w3schools and pinterest! e) Did I mention that if you search for something you actually find it?

I use Brave search. It's free, and IMO the quality of search results is actually _better_ than Google's. I occasionally add the `g!` shebang to get google results for a query when Brave results aren't great, and the Google ones are often even less relevant.

For some reason I don't really see other people talk about it on HN, but I absolutely love it. You don't need to use a specific browser (I use firefox on desktop and iOS) or use any other Brave products/features, it's completely standalone.

I am curious how often others actually use a general search engine and what their searches are. I probably only search (using duck duck go) two or three times a week. This week it was for:

1. A very specific error message nodejs was giving me on one platform about ssl. I usually end up doing site:stackoverflow.com

2. A firmware upgrade for an NVR system (hunting through the manufacturer's website was futile, so I did a search site site:manufacturer.com)

And in both of these cases, while I was using ddg, I was only using it as an index into a specific site, rather than searching the internet.

Other things that I search for, I tend to go to a more direct search engine. If I want to know about a thing/person/event, I just search wikipedia. If I am looking up a band, I just search metal-archives or bandcamp. For movies/cast, straight to imdb. For computer products, straight to newegg. For news, I go straight to my preferred new sources. For Elixir questions, straight to elixir forums. Restaurants, straight to maps.

So, what is it everyone is actually using Google (or other general search engines) for?

As a developer, I agree. When coding, I look for three things:

- well-written blog articles

A single article, describing a real dev solving a real business challenge with real code, is the best way to answer technical questions. They provide a lot of context, and reasoning, and have real-world advice which is invaluable to me.

I use Google for this, but it requires care. A lot of sites are poorly written, or copied from other sites, or are gibberish. With experience you can quickly tell if a blog post is going to be of high enough quality or not.

- short answers, or reference documentation

Google/StackOverflow is okay to answer the question "I have tech X and want Y using library Z". Just recently I've switched to asking GitHub Copilot for answers to small questions. It's not perfect but incredibly valuable. The big downside is since Copilot sends code to a server, it's not okay when working with client code. Copilot is great for learning, though.

For reference docs I use Google to find manpage sites, then I setup custom searches for them. Example: https://man.cx/ for Linux docs, and https://ss64.com/osx/ for macOS.

There's also https://devdocs.io/ which is incredibly fast but too webdev-centric compared to my normal work.

- example code

This site is magic! Incredibly useful source code search engine: https://grep.app/

Example: Kubernetes manifests can be complex and mysterious. The following produces 250,000(!) Kubernetes YAML manifests for study. Enjoy!

https://grep.app/search?q=apiVersion%3A&words=true&filter[la...

Brave's search is actually pretty good. It has been my daily driver for a month or so. It seems to prioritize forums and what-not.

It also supports !g , so if a search doesn't return expected results I just head to google.

I pay for Neeva: https://neeva.com/

I started using it as a Beta product, and then continued with a paid subscription.

You can bump search sources up/down so filter out website you don't care about or emphasize those you do like.

They just launched a ChatGPT (Neeva AI) search result integration, which is as good as can be expected - it includes citations, which is nice.

I pay for Kagi, results are good and the ability to raise/lower the ranking of results for future queries is really interesting.

Over the last few weeks searching for images I found Bing to be alot better and remind of the old days of Google.

I found more value in its results than Google. And I don't even like Microsoft.

Founder at https://Lexii.ai here—we’re a GPT-3 based search engine that pulls in real-time legacy search results and cites sources. Would love feedback, we’re just in alpha but we’ve already got ~50,000 searches per month.

I default to DDG (have for years) but the results are typically so completely useless that I switch to Google most of the time.

Google results are usually only slightly better than DDG, and this is aggressively worsened by Google's extremely user-hostile experience (for this particular user), but sometimes that's sufficient to get me where I'm trying to go.

Rapidly reaching a point where I'm best off searching Reddit and hoping what I want was mentioned there at some point and turns up in a result, but they also have a user-hostile (for me) experience, subpar search, and an ever-increasing amount of plain gibberish noise to sift through.

I'm basically at the "The web was better before Altavista" point.

SearX - in my case SearXNG [1] - running on the server-under-the-stairs, pointed at a host of different search engines (including Google). It'll give you results returned by all of those engines, it makes clear which subjects are being censored by which search engine and it makes sure your search history does not end up feeding the data-hungry beasts of Google, Apple, Microsoft and all the others.

[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

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

Also https://crowdview.ai/ for 100% organic, forum search.

I don't use kagi.com because I don't like idea of linking my credit card to search queries.

I have no real replacement but bounce between DuckDuckgo and Google.

But this search tool intrigues

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Right now I am okay with DDG. The amount of times I have resorted to tacking on the !g has only been decreasing, and lately I have found that if DDG can't find it neither can google. I also like being able to do the bangs directly in my url bar, it's a good poweruser utility.

I also use one extra thing, an extension called 'highlight or hide search engine results'[1]. I have first party documentation highlighted in blue, good community sites in green, lower quality sites greyed out, and content farms hidden completely. I've also been storing page highlights in raindrop.io[2]

Between the two of these I spend less overall time actually reviewing the search results and it is easier for me to return to good results that I found in the past.

[1] https://github.com/pistom/hohser

[2] https://raindrop.io/

Still waiting for a search engine that only searches Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Flickr, and a handful of other sites.

On both Google and Duckduckgo, I have come to loathe the mass of nonsense pseudo-blogposts on dev topics from some contentfarms that have started to poison all search results a couple of years ago. I wish there was a search engine that eliminates all that crap. I can block individual sites, but it doesn't help.

I don't know what queries y'all are doing, but I can't think of the last time I wasn't able to find what I was looking for through Google. About the only time that happens is when Google has indexed a page, but the page has since been removed (and didn't allow caching, grrr).

Used DDG on and off (mostly off) for years. Always ended up doing !g and getting better results. Google results got trashy even with Firefox extension that blacklisted garbage sites. Paid for kagi since December and it's great. No regrets, will keep paying.

https://searx.ebnar.xyz/

One of the many SearXNG available, see https://searx.space

I use Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org/. The quality of the results is similar, if not better than those of Google Search. Also, DDG as a second resort.

Regarding Google search results, could some explain to me what it is that appears after the first few sections of results and the format changes to something else entirely? When I run the search on my iPhone for “baseball”, I get a few screens worth of normal looking stuff and then if I keep scrolling past the “More search results” link the background turns pinkish and scrolling gets jerky. Nothing of real value ever shows up at this point and the user experience is absolutely terrible. Are these paid placements? Does this section of results have a proper name?

DuckDuckGo, if they can't find it my experience is that neither can Google.

I do make frequent use of !wen to get a Wikipedia article, if I already know that's what I want.

95% happy with DuckDuckGo. For the rest, I resort to Google.

I've been using Brave search. DDG if brave can't find it, and startpage if I really just want Google results.

Google used to be so good that other engines were noticeably less usable. As Google keeps getting worse and worse, the alternatives get relatively better. Even if brave and DDG aren't on the same level as Google ten years ago, they're miles better than Google today.

Duckduckgo has been great for me

Haven't used Google search in my personal life for years. I currently use a mixture of metager.org and qwant.com. You get used to it really quickly and also build up a knowledge base of bookmarks. On my path to remove big tech from my life Google was the easiest to drop (Bar YouTube which I now only use exclusively with frontends, RSS, and yt-dlp).

Duck Duck Go, but I’m building my own. Not in a “my startup will compete with Google” way, but in a self-hosted way.

YaCy is a really cool open source search engine and web indexer, and features p2p index sharing. Im hosting my own crawler, and feeding my browser history in, so it’ll index my history, and make finding things I’ve already seen (eg documentation) easy.

Is there any true search engine available? By which I mean one where I can actually write queries, narrow those queries, filter results based on containing or not containing a pattern, and so on.

All of what are sold as search engines today that are known to me are just chatbots of varying quality. As far as I know the last search engine was Altavista.

Apparently Bing will release new search functionality which boosted with GPT4 perhaps that will be replacement.

Duckduckgo, Startpage and Bing

DDG results are usually good on their own now.

With bangs I can use !s for anonymized Google results, !g for Google, !yt for Youtube.

I use Bing at work for Edge browser due to the Office 365 search and also get rid of the nag screens... But I REALLY like the layout of Bing.

DDG, with the very rare !g to search Google. DDG has been doing a great job for my needs.

I've been using DDG for years now, and find it superior to Google 90% of the time.

startpage.com and ddg. Both work great. Takes a bit of getting used to, since it's less personalised, but I've not missed it since.

Using it for years already

Duck duck go works fine for me since 2019 or so. Sometimes google is better but its rare now.

Bing image search has gotten me results that Google could not.

A browser search shortcut for:

site:reddit.com OR site:news.ycombinator.com %s

I alternate between Ask Jeeves and Bing for maximum privacy

https://neeva.com/

It's not free but they aren't in the business of building marketing profiles, only for improving the science of search.

Google and ChatGPT but not in that order.

ChatGPT

you.com

andisearch.com you.com neeva.ai duckduckgo ChatGPT (use with caution)

ChatGPT for some queries

you.com neeva.ai andisearch.com duckduckgo chatGPT

andisearch.com neeva.ai you.com duckduckgo ChatGPT

ChatGPT. Simple.

Andi Search!