As asked.
My first choice is actually Kagi these days. I pay for my search provider to have some peace of mind that my search provider isn’t selling me.
I got it not too long ago, and I love it. The results are good, and the features are what i wish all search engines had. Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
In the meantime, everyone should check out their Small Web intiative. Gives you a random blog or small website. There’s some really good articles I would have never read otherwise.
Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
Judging by their ethos so far, I don’t think that’s a goal. I’d almost say it’s a non-goal.
I hope you’re right, but there’s plenty of well meaning projects and people that saw a large amount of money being offered and blinked.
I used to pay for kagi, but their CEO have some opinions that I absolutely hate about how to handle some issues, and this was a deal breaker for me. Nowadays I’m using searxng
What opinions can I ask? first time I’ve heard this
They announced a few months ago that they would partner with Brave to surface Brave search results too. The CEO of Brave is known to be homophobic. People got mad, and Kagi’s response was that they are too small to be picky, and have to focus on search quality.
And theres the issue someone opened on their page suggesting to include a special card on suicide related searches telling people how to find help, and the CEO dismissed saying it can be just someone curious making the search and he don’t want to “set a precedent” on showing things the user is not actively searching
I… think I agree with that though.
I’m not saying there isn’t a grey area between being socially conscious or full blow libertarian, but I do think that a search engine operates much better when it is unrestricted by societal qualms.
Look how stunted ChatGPT becomes with each new rendition, or how SDXL is far more restrictive in what it can express compared to its earlier SD1.5 models.
And also, like, their partnership with one of the most immoral companies on this planet drive most of the search results quality from the very beginning (Google). You didn’t sign up for a morally perfect search engine.
When people made such a huge fuss about the CEO of some minor index that Kagi also happens to use beside like 10 others being a douche, all I could do is shake my head.
does kagi spit out location-relevant information? that’s something I’ve really missed on startpage, I like being able to just google “chinese food” and have the restaurants near me spit back out, and if a privacy-centered search engine can return a result comparable to something like google there that’d make me real happy
There is a map search mode that does surface location aware results, after explicitly getting your permission to get your location.
Kagi does not request location permission; it uses network location (IP geo lookup).
So this is confusing. I did not know about the maps mode (thanks @randomperson@lemmy.today!). If you show the map and then press the “target” symbol to get your location, Kagi will prompt to enable geolocation.
When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away. But if I select Maps first, then it shows my local area and I can search on the map.
Oh, yes indeed. Map mode would request accurate geolocation.
When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away.
Yeah, that’s an unfortunate reality of IP geolocation, it’s not very accurate to begin with and can be extremely inaccurate in some cases too.
Does Google (without a login) have the same issue with your public IP?Perhaps when a location query is detected Kagi could show a little button to use accurate geolocation instead. They seem to be pretty on top of little UX issues like these, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they implemented a solution like that if you opened a feedback thread.
duckduckgo is a US company and the CEO is the previous founder of The Names Database. i don’t know how anyone trusts it when there are so many EU alternatives
Like for example?
Qwant (france-based), startpage (NL-based), searxng (bunch of host options)
honorary mention to Stract which is currently totally useless because the results are so random, but hopefully in a few years it will be a proper alternative. they are indexing the web from scratch in order to not have to rely on existing data from other search engines (which is why the results are terrible right now lol)
Start page was purchased by an ad company a while back
FUCK ME.
Yeah, there’s no winning
didn’t know, that sucks
Yes it does. We have almost no options left any more. They all get ventured capitalisted
I think mojeek is the best in privacy atm but it isn’t really good as a search engine.
you can smash the “submit feedback” button on the page when you get a duff search and send it into us, it’s how we improve: https://blog.mojeek.com/2024/02/major-algorithm-update.html
Will do and i love your ethics.
I’ve used DDG for years but I’m worried that Microsoft has some power with them. Also that its headquarters is in the US, where there are hardly any laws that protect the user. I used Qwant for a season, based in France, but he asked me to remove the browser’s ad blocker. Since then, I use a SearXNG instance, waiting to mount my own. Very happy.
I used to use DDG until they started censoring results.
I use Brave Search and Startpage. The latter is basically just a private Google proxy with some cool features and the former is fully independent, private, aesthetically appealing and has nice optional AI features.
DDG really does censor results hard. They even blocked my list of US atrocities from their search results.
Yeah I noticed that, it’s why I don’t really use them. Astroturfed to shit.
EDIT: OMG unrelated but i’m so glad you wrote https://dessalines.github.io/essays/nietzsche.html because I got into arguments on hexbear over that guy being a fascist POS and it’s so vindicating to read someone backing me up on that after all the gaslighting they put me through.
Thx! I have no why some ppl twist their brains in knots trying to defend nietzche. I still come across ppl who read that and try to say he actually meant the opposite.
I know right! And I’m the problematic one for pointing out just how ridiculous that reasoning is.
I use startpage.
Also a bit unrelated, but I just found that Gigablast shut down 10 months ago. And also this (a bit earlier) comment from the author: (source)
Yeah, Google forced my search engine basically out of business. I had ixquick.com as a big client at one time; I was providing them with search results from my custom web search engine. Then their CEO called me one day and told me he was cancelling, even though he’d been a client for over 10 years. He said it was because of some change Google had made to their agreement. Ixquick needed Google’s results and ads for their startpage.com website, and, even though my results were shown on their ixquick.com and later ixquick.eu sites, apparently Google wasn’t good with that.
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
And it was initially founded in 1996!
_Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer_
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
_Source: https://metager.org/lang_
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And other useful features, for example:
That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.
_Source: https://metager.org/tips_
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
Stract seems like an interesting option with optics and such. What is your opinion on it?
I only just started using it recently, so i don’t have a solid opinion yet, but it seems pretty good!
Thanks! I guess I’ll just try and using it for a while :)
coming up to 20 years of no tracking, 18 of having the first privacy policy to say it: https://web.archive.org/web/20060318104627/http://www.mojeek.com/privacy.html
hopefully a good consensus 😅 at least seen very little of people saying bad
Me too and when i tried it the results were on par with google which isn’t saying much nowadays though.
This is what I use because they take your ad revenue and plant trees. Judge for yourself.
Second this, it’s fast and they have good privacy practices as far as I’m aware.
Duck duck go is my 2nd lol. SearX is my first.
Kagi
gemini search engines are not so bad for likeminded folks with likeminded topics.
ex: <rare linux search> 12 results!
vs searching windows how to pay for windows. 0 results. srry. gemini is small.Gemini as in google AI search? Or gemini as in the protocol?
gemini protocol. thank u for prompting for clarification.
what search engines are there?
gemini://auragem.letz.dev/search/
gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/
gemini://geminispace.info/
gemini://gemplex.space/
gemini://auragem.letz.dev/search/features/
gemini://tlgs.one/doc/search
gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/docs/features.gmi
gemini://geminispace.info/documentation/searchingwow, thanks for the follow up!
TIL there’s a ton of search engines I’ve never heard of.
