Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn’t a clear solution to navigating the web because it’s either ai slop or the results are poor.
And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you’re looking for.
And so I told them I’d compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.
So far I have:
Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.
Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik
Ecosia: works great but relies on bing
I have tried things like qwant ect but haven’t really settled on those.
Any other suggestions?
I’d tell em to use udm14 but it’s still google so I’d rather keep that as a plan B.
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Well, at risk of downvotes…
I know what your asking but tbh I generally don’t search, at least not like we used to. It’s weird to say that, like I’m making some claim to heightened purity or some bullshit but it’s not that at all. Search is just … noisy AF these days.
I actually find myself using fewer sources, more directly and own my terms.
Eg: For something like PubMed, I go to pubmed (or define a proper boolean PICO search in an indexing tool). Sci-hub is a good source too.
https://sci-hub.st/
Or I can hit the wikipedia API (or even better, self hosted kiwix) and find what I need.
https://kiwix.org/en/
Or, for known, commonly visited sites (like fan wikis), I use self-written tools.
There are plenty of sites have public facing, nicely formatted, JSON friendly results. Others are just clean to scrape. A recent discovery was Muvitimes (for getting movie times listings).
https://muvitimes.com/
These tools query my white listed sites to a particular depth, collect the results I need, and present them for review.
You can then cache the info locally to query against using something like Meilisearch.
https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch
There are other options too. Something like Scrapy can collect structured data and a Trafilatura-like extractor can remove menus, adverts, and repeated page content.
https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy
I’ve even use something like self hosted Perplexica. It can query SearXNG, Tavily, Exa or other sources.
https://github.com/kiranz/perplexica
Honestly, if it’s a quick throw away search, I’ll call my self hosted llm, get it to pull from Exa and give me the summary and citations. That’s been miles better than most other options for me but YMMV.
Finally, if you’re talking about random occasional searches on phone, when I can’t access my LAN, I don’t mind DDG-lite
https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
Yandex for reverse image search or piracy content
The noai DDG for everything else.
Unfortunately I have notice for the last couple of months that some simple things I can’t just find the answer and the shit AI suggestion baked in the google search is giving me better results and I don’t think that is the AI that got better.
Kagi. Once you try it you’ll never go back.
I never understood the hype about it. I tried it for a while then my trial expired. I cannot say I miss it. It was okay, nothing that blew my mind
I pay for Kagi. The results are good oob and you can downrank/ban websites.
Holy shit, I’ve been wanting that for years. I’ll have to check them out.
Edit: Aaaand they have a built in AI despite calling themselves “human-focussed”. That’s a turnoff. If I’m paying for a search engine, I’d prefer to have a subscription option with the AI stripped out so I’m not subsidizing it for others.
Plus, I’m thinking about it I’m not exactly on board with needing an account with a search engine. That makes it super easy to track you. Meanwhile, using noai.duckduckgo anonymously via a VPN is way more private
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Because it’s a tool that can serve humans. Not strictly search-related, but their AI-based translation tool is genuinely great and very useful to me.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html
You don’t have to use built-in AI, it only triggers when you explicitly ask for it and you can completely disable it in the settings.
They also have anti-slop filters, BTW: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
Finally, not sure what models the search summarizer and the translation tool use, but the assistant lets you use open weights model like Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek et al.
I don’t care. It’s bundled in with even the basic plan, which means you’re paying for it, even if you don’t use it. And no, it’s not magically better to use open models.
I don’t get how this concept is so hard to understand.
1: I clearly established a boundary and you insisted on pushing it. Learn to take a fucking hint.
2: You know what’s even better? Not using AI at all.
I feel bad for anyone you’ve ever had a relationship with. You act like an abuser.
Edit: Seriously? You downvoted all of my comments? You just keep getting more petty