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Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

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531–540 of 614 posts

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

#531
post #15

I am indeed looking into an alternative to Google recently, but more because of my need of a good search mcp server for my coding agents. I am thinking about either exa or kagi, but I have no idea which one is better. Also exa seems not quite frequently mentioned in the community, wondering why.

I've had generally good experiences with Exa, I use it as an MCP in all my various coding tools and use the API whenever I build an AI thing that needs search. Also an extremely happy Kagi user but can't speak to their API, haven't tried it yet.

And I just checked kagi search API is in public preview now

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

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yandex also censors political things. Your best bet is to search everywhere because everyone is "compromised" from some side.

Yes, but it censors different political things. Which is why I do exactly what you describe.

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

#533

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

Thanks for sharing this, I did not know about uruky. 5 euros no ads and unlimited take my money :) do you have pricing for agents search ?

Thanks! You can go nuts (there are only rate limits, not search limits, since we don't even track that count), since we have an API. It's in the FAQ.

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

#534
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…

Not something I want to see happen, because I love Kagi, but it surprises me that Apple haven't already bought them.

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

#535
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Never ever trust AI summary cooking instructions. Holy crap. I made a serious error with that once.

I often use LLMs to suggest recipes based on some criterias, but yes once you decided what you want to cook always go find some non-IA recipes for it

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

#536
post #310

The funny thing is that as much as everyone complains about AI overviews and Google losing the plot and so on, about a year and a half ago the “where did you hear about us” field on my website stopped being dominated by “Google” and started being dominated by “ChatGPT”. Normal people are using AI for search more already, Google is just trying to stop their primary business from completely disappearing.

My dad exclusively uses perplexity and I think completely stopped using google. It's definitely more common than we realize.

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

#537
for the non opinionated, duckduckgo with an adblocker has served me just fine for the better part of a decade.

you can simply set the search as you like and save as a search url [1] that can be set in the browser once and forget.

their bangs are useful to search directly in a specific site (e.g. useful workaround for reddit search results not coming anymore). when i tried kagi, i noticed that they have adopted a similar system, which has to be inspired.

my overall search experience has been poor even before the GPTs, but this is just fine for almost everything.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/params

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

#538

Ohi, I'm the author of the open source Searx metasearch engine. I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the same goal when I started Searx development: reduce dependence on online search engines. Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query l…

Noob question; So if i only use the Firefox extension, all pages Hister will "fetch and store" will have gone through my browsers content blocker (uBlock Origin) before being saved ?

Yes, the extension extracts the content of the tabs as your browsers renders them. This includes applying all your extension's modifications as well.

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

#539
post #310

The funny thing is that as much as everyone complains about AI overviews and Google losing the plot and so on, about a year and a half ago the “where did you hear about us” field on my website stopped being dominated by “Google” and started being dominated by “ChatGPT”. Normal people are using AI for search more already, Google is just trying to stop their primary business from completely disappearing.

But then what's the point of using google if I can use any chatbot directly.

They are transforming google search into chatbot but they already have a chatbot and by dping that they are losing google search product completely.

I miss times when search used to be fulltext search (also in youtube, ebay, etc). Now it is some kind of embedding vector search skewed by marketing and my previous visit history. It often shows completely irelevant and useless results and it is much harder (even impossible sometimes) to find something even though I am sure it exists (and I am able to find it eventually but it takes much more effort).

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship? This isn't about free speech, there's a war on.

There's not just one war on, there are many. Should Kagi exclude all the results from American companies because of the actions of the US government in Iran?

Depends which side of the war you're on I guess? Or more to the point, whose money kagi wants to go after.
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