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google search results are still kind of useful especially for non-english language queries, anyone knows a good alternative?
searxng also doesn't really seem to work these days..
Duckduckgo is surprisingly okay, even with non-english queries by using the region selector (your experience may vary)
ddg is my primary right now, it absolutely sucks for korean queries sadly
Isn't it just Bing with privacy? Or do they use their own tweeks or something? It's what I use nowadays since google never finds anything i search for
DDG is an US based company. They will comply to all the patriot act bullshit and pipeline all your searches to the NSA...
If they really cared about privacy they wouldn't be based in the US.
This might be one of those things where self hosting isn't worth the pain, like email.
I've been using Kagi for several years now and have been very happy with it.
They are literally giving part of your subscription fee to fucking Russia. In comparison, DuckDuckGo have ended their partnership with Yandex. Vlads refusal to follow suit and his steadfast support of Yandex is quite telling to say the least.
Yet another part of your subscription goes to Elon Musks xAI to support Grok in their AI assistant. Even if you are not using that model, all paying users are effectively subsidizing the cost of the Grok API calls. You can't opt out of that.
Man, I used kagi for 2 months or so and stopped subscribing after that because while there wasn't really anything that I'd seen that'd make me outright unsubscribe there were many things that I found odd and it didn't make sense to pay so much for a product that I didn't agree with all that much. For instance:
I was unable to remove yandex from my search because:
what makes it difficult to act on this is that Kagi does not save searches as a matter of privacy policy, and including more moving parts would make debugging search quality issues nearly impossible
Despite having so many AI features that barely fit into a search engine, such as a translator (slop frontend) and an entire browser?
It called itself "unprofitable" because search is so expensive while giving an honestly insane quota of AI use as far as I can understand (ex. if user pays 10$ for the kagi subscription: 10$ - 20% worth of tokens = 8$ total quota), giving 100 free searches with, as far as I could see, very little protection against burner emails (the translator seems to not need an account at all and it's an llm frontend, so it shouldn't be cheap), and it had many different views in many different places from me.
But all that made me do was hmmm and shrug it off. I mean, we're different humans from different backgrounds, of course we'd hold different views.
But holy shit. Hoooooooly shit. That conversation about the GDPR in the article. What the fuck. What in the actual fuck did I just read there. The fact that the CEO emailed him an explanation despite him explicitly asking to not be emailed too. Bruh.
Searxng has been pretty sweet, been hosting my own for about a year and some change with pretty good results.
I do get blocked by engines occasionally which can have a drastic impact on results.
kinda works, but their results are a bit crippled compared to google (also, no way to search specific timeframe)
searxng also doesn't really seem to work these days..
Of note, this depends on the instance. I occasionally hop between public instances whenever one is no longer reliable. Google and friends are blocking requests from SearXNG instances because it is in their business interests to kill competition
As for alternatives, I would avoid DDG since they seem to be going a similar route as Google with a front page filled with ads and the emphasis towards their chatbot is not to my taste. Plus, DDG is hosted in the U.S., so privacy-wise it's not as good. Startpage was purchased by an American advertising company some time ago, which isn't great. Brave Search is also one, but they are doing some shady things on their browser with crypto and whatnot, so I don't particularly trust them. Plus, they are an American for-profit.
Qwant and Ecosia are solid options, the former is a French for-profit and the latter a German non-profit, and they are working towards an independent European search index that is being trialled in France! Both are quite good, Qwant is shinier and magical blue, while Ecosia is simpler and earthy green.
Ecosia also uses a portion of their revenue for planting trees, which is really neat, and they are super transparent about where their earnings go!
I personally use a mix of SearXNG and Ecosia, and I sometimes use Qwant too for certain queries.
Ecosia also has an LLM which make little sense with their mission IMO
I run SearXNG and haven't looked back honestly, could never get on with Whoogle's UI
Searxng works fine for me. It's at least as good as google?
Entirely depends on the instance admin and whether or not they keep it maintained and up to date.
Kinda, I was a owner of a public instance. It was pretty high on the list so I guess some people used it. The Problem was, that Google ratelimited me all the time. Not even with 5 pretty good residential proxies it was working. The only querys without ratelimits are bing and sometime wikipedia.
Are about the only selfhosted ones I know of. I run SearxNG and have a good deal of success with it. It does bork image searches sometimes and tosses in these lithograph artworks, which are quite interesting to me, but don't help in the search itself. In as much as it will draw the ire of some, AI makes a pretty good search engine if you are searching for really specific things like: List all Blues artists that were active in 1942 in Memphis. Give resource links.
SearXNG works flawlessly....
I like SearXNG,brave search and mojeek. I understand the controversies with Brave but it's the only good one I can find.
I just gave up on searxng too.
I didn't even make it an entire day of searxng, front the literally fist search I tried I was getting blocked haha
All of this when you get the super excellent Kagi for 10 dollars, from an actual search company that values privacy.
Its exactly what everyone wants but no, can't pay 10 dollars I guess. :)
from an actual search company that values privacy.
California company obliged by FVEY? While I appreciate their efforts, American based companies kind of have a history of abandoning their privacy-respecting ways once subpoenaed.
USA gag orders are real. Cannot trust US companies selling privacy at all.
I've seen so many people say that kagi is overhyped
Elsewhere in thread it talks about kagi giving money to Russia and Musk which is not something I'd support
just don't "google it".
Ahh, use an LLM instead, got it, thanks!
/s
Kagi.
Searxng too much effort.
KagI is pretty good in various languages.