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Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

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Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#71

Post by rdmuser »

For searches where you want more that just the first result and want a depth of results to go through and maybe even check out more than the first page of results I like to use meta-search engines that grab results from multiple sources. Plus it helps route around censorship since you are getting results from a variety of sources. Searxng is the best known one.

I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy.

On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere.

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

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#72

Post by 59percentmore »

s_dev wrote: post #39

Google as a search engine peaked in 2005. Since then they've become far more profitable, increased revenue by orders of magnitude, brought search to many more areas, increased headcount massively, improved their share price massively, diversified, serve far more paying customers, become more efficient per query, built data centres, devices and chips with more vertical integration etc. But as a consumer product for si…

This comment reads as, "It's been bad forever, but only a little, and look at all the good stuff that happened!"

Let me correct.

Search was good as late as 2010, when they changed the engine to facilitate an "instant search, search-as-you-type" feature. It was decent until around 2015, when a pivot to privileging "brands" poisoned the results. And it's been useless since the pivot to semantic search (in part to facilitate Home/Nest products) and a series of index purges over the past few years.

We had something very good, and we had it for a good while, and it was destroyed by a company that was a blackhole for investment and some of the brightest minds of my generation, sucking up untold amounts of labor and radiating little but "exceptionally deleterious to society" particles.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#74

Post by glanzwulf »

nekzn wrote: post #18

I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse. I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature…

> It messes up sometimes

i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#75

Post by jvidalv »

d12bb wrote: post #7

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

I mean, the root problem is, who searches anymore? Or better said, the ones who search are decreasing exponentially.

I only use Google to search for reddit posts.

The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#77

Post by margorczynski »

bobajeff wrote: post #50
nekzn wrote: post #18

I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse. I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature…

I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.

> Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system

I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO.

At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good data.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#78

Post by t-writescode »

59percentmore wrote: post #76

The number of "Kagi" comments here is amusing (suspicious), considering how few people actually use Kagi.

Sometimes there is, actually, a vocal minority.

And at least I know that I am happy to talk about a product that I pay for. Is some of it because I feel like there's a sunk cost - the amount of money that I've paid into it? Yes, of course there is. Is it a good search engine? Yes.

Do I wish there were features added to it that they've promised for a while now? (namely being able to pay for more AI credits, especially if you paid a year in advance?) Yes.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#79

Post by BrunoBernardino »

While there are good alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, or Ecosia, there are also ad-free alternatives, where you're not the product, like Kagi [1] or Uruky [2] (I co-founded Uruky, which is also currently and for the foreseeable future "No-AI")!

[1]: https://kagi.com

[2]: https://uruky.com

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#80

Post by kimos »

d12bb wrote: post #7

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

My wife and I have a family account. I absolutely love it and have used it for a while. I’m a programmer and use it more for that kind of thing. She, however, does the purchasing and shopping and product hunting for our house. She keeps trying to use it but ends up with Google tabs open anyway. As as much as I’m a big Kagi fan, YMMV depending on your usage patterns.
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