HACKER Q&A
📣 breck

A search engine that excludes all sites with ads and/or paywalls?


I've decided to leave Google Search. It was nice for decades, but declined to being unusable.

Now I primarily use ChatGPT and Claude for my information.

However, I still need a search engine to find primary datasets, primary images, et cetera.

I prefer content from the personal blogs and websites of real people. I particularly love researchers who post their research to their own sites (in addition to or in preference of journals).

What engine should I switch to?

I don't want any sites to appear that contain ads or paywalls.

Right now I'm using Kagi, but appending site:*.edu to my queries to exclude paywall sites like ResearchGate.net.

Is there something better?

  👤 kirubakaran Accepted Answer ✓
https://search.marginalia.nu/ by our own https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marginalia_nu
👤 breck
Update: I've reverted back to Google for now. Kagi was neat, but requiring login for search was very bad ux(for example, I use multiple browsers, incognito mode, etc).

I like the Google product, it's the search index that's full of junk.

When researching and looking for high quality, original source content, I want a different index than what they currently offer.

If anyone knows of a solution, would love to learn!

👤 BOOSTERHIDROGEN
I've already tried Kagi and Perplexity, but now I'm trying You.com. What matters to me is the cheapest option.
👤 Calishat
The Stract open source search engine has a setting to mark results with probable ads or paywalls: https://stract.com/settings

The API is currently free and also has that feature.

I've been working on tools to make Google search better for a couple of years now and have gathered 18 of them into a site called SearchTweaks: https://searchtweaks.com/ . The site is completely free (no cost, no ads, no tracking.) You might find No Shop Sherlock useful, or one of the query builders.

👤 cranberryturkey
checkout perplexity.ai (I think that's it).