I’d like to start a thread for people to share what they’re using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.
I’m doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my “stack” has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.
My (shitty and getting worse) solution:
- DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG’s relevance has been shit for its entire existence
- StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
- currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it’s not easy to set up if you don’t use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with
The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn’t return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.
BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.
I’d love to hear suggestions.
tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines
Here is a list of alternative (meta-)search engines:
Swisscow
Qwant
Ecosia
DuckDuckGo
SearXNG
MetaGer
Leta by Mullvad
Mojeek
Kagi (Paid I think)
Das all I can remember rn.
SearxNG has been bad lately, so just put priority words first to get around it.
Hwat exactly do you mean by SearXNG being bad? Cause in some sens that isn’t even a thing. It’s a meta search engine.
The results do not match the search. Often it’s a bunch of Chinese. I just switch to Swisscows. When SearXNG gets ironed out, I’ll probably switch back just because I like that it’s federated.
You fundamentally misunderstand the techbology you are using. SearXNG is not federated, it is a selfhostable meta search engine. If you have an instance that has a lot of chinese results, then that instance’s owner hss chosen chinese search engines. SearXNG can be considered to have the exact same results as other engines do. You can only receive Google results, Brave, what have you, but it being a meta search engine, you can also mix results. It can also search other indices than search engines for the modern web, such as wikis or published papers. SearXNG is “ironed out”. It’s feature complete.