It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.
Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.
- Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
- Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
- Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
- Yandex: https://yandex.com/
If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?
EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.
I find all the kagi mentions to be very suspicious
It’s not, really, I switched from Google some years ago and had accepted my faith with DuckDuckGo, but then tried out Kagi. I use search so much daily for work, the relief of getting quality results again is immense and probably saves me hours per week. I get much better results from Kagi than I got at the end from Google, and I can tune them to my liking:
…and so on and so on. It’s just so effective.
… suspicious
You can redirect old reddit with the tampermonkey extension
https://greasyfork.org/scripts/44669
Yeah there are some good solutions to achieve this, I’m a big fan of the libredirect project, but currently I’m just setting up the redirects I want directly in Kagi so any URLs in the search results are already rewritten to my liking.
I always fear it comes across that way when I recommend it to people here. I’m just a very happy user and want to see them succeed.
I find it expensive for what it is (given that I still get a limited number of searches) and I’m not comfortable with some of their ways (I don’t want anything to do with AI, and I the idea they have of being nonpolitical seems dangerously naive to me). I also don’t like supporting non-FOSS projects all that much.
Still, it’s the best search I’ve found, and I’m paying every month until I find something better. It’s worth it.
If I had stock/investments in a search engine, you better fucking believe Id also have a bunch of bots crawling for the terms “What is the best search engine” and immediately hijack the convo with bots upvoting my search engine.
I cannot explain how easy it is to do this.
Your comment belongs higher. When given the opportunity to make money by social media advertising sometimes in the thousands or millions, companies, share holders, and conflict of interest groups take it. Cablemod’s burning adapters, cryptocurrency scams, payed positive youtube reviews are some great examples. In general there is no honor system and its best to assume anything that can be abused will.
Also manipulating votes is incredibly effective towards swaying public opinion due to the bandwagon effect. Spend a days worth of effort making fake accounts and downvoting any opinion you see as undesirable and most people will follow suit. This is especially bad in echo chambers like on twitter, reddit, etc.
I wish a broader audience could be aware of this. The best I can do is try to spread the word.
Sources:
same. specially considering how privacy invasive kagi is.
How is it privacy invasive?
I know nothing about Kagi, except that it requires an account and is paid. So I assume all searches are tied to that account and there is no way to do an anonymous search.Disregard I’m a fool
Literally the first paragraph on their website
The Patriot Act and Snowden’s leaks have shown companies will go against their privacy policy to appease governments. Search engines especially are targeted by five eyes with the PRISM program where copies of all your data, linked to your payment, are sent to Five Eyes and stored. Gag orders and legal threats prevent disclosure, as has been done with prior tech companies who have tried to push back against this.
Be wary of trusting corporations with your data as monetization is a powerful incentive.
Lemmy is different though right?… right?
With lemmy you are trusting whatever instance your account is on, and really any federated instances since they could choose to hold onto your posts and comments
Thanks, edited the comment!
I don’t know if I believe that. It’s a paid service, so the only way to enforce that unpaid users cannot search is to take a search request and check if it is coming from your account. Same with basic things like rate limiting requests. You literally need to associate your requests to an account to make basic functionality like this work.
If they do this but just don’t log it, then that means there is no way for their devs to ever debug issues users have or to monitor their services. I’m highly skeptical.
Also, “trust us” is something I’ve heard too many times.
That’s not the same as logging.
They just need to check the session of the user on the fly during the search operation. Once the search is done they don’t need to persist any record linking the search and the user.
They don’t need to tie the searches to an account. They log them anonymously. From their privacy policy:
and am I supposed to believe such a bold claim? the only reason they give is “trust me, bro. I pinky promise I’m not logging anything”.
You have one account, every search query you make is associated with that account. And even if they aren’t selling that ultra sensitive data, I’m sure they are keeping logs to prevent abuse and fix bugs which could be used when a third party gains access to their servers (malicious actors, law enforcement, etc).
And that’s assuming that Kagi is not mining and or selling any data themselves, which is a bold assumption given how little we know about their proprietary product. If at least they published the source code, but no. I’m supposed to trust a proprietary black box which could potentially be linking every search query back to me.
I don’t trust or ever plan on getting Kagi, but in their defense, the “trust me bro” is a large portion of privacy services. I use Mullvad VPN and think they have a great reputation that have proved themselves. I have no however, personally checked the servers to verify myself what’s running, so I am trusting then. Even when running open source software, I know none of us here have actually looked into every line of code of our browsers or our phones to see what’s all running. It’s simply unfeasible, so trust and reputation is still required at the end of the day.
That’s absolutely true. The problem is that, to make use of VPN services, it’s required to have an account or other identifier.
But that’s no true for search engines. If I wanted to, I could make completely anonymous searches using SearXNG or DDG from different IPs and they would not have any way to correlate the search queries.
That’s not true with Kagi and it’s a completely unnecessary privacy risk you’re taking when using it.
How is it privacy invasive? For example, compared to competition like Google?
Not op, nor i have any experience with kagi, but i suspect there is no way to do an Anonymous search with kagi.
copypasting the other comment I made in this thread:
and am I supposed to believe such a bold claim? the only reason they give is “trust me, bro. I pinky promise I’m not logging anything”.
You have one account, every search query you make is associated with that account. And even if they aren’t selling that ultra sensitive data, I’m sure they are keeping logs to prevent abuse and fix bugs which could be used when a third party gains access to their servers (malicious actors, law enforcement, etc).
And that’s assuming that Kagi is not mining and or selling any data themselves, which is a bold assumption given how little we know about their proprietary product. If at least they published the source code, but no. I’m supposed to trust a proprietary black box which could potentially be linking every search query back to me.
I don’t have any skin in this game. I just wanted to point out that you went from “given how privacy invasive this particular entity is”
To
“… assuming… how little we know… could potentially”
That’s a pretty big leap from a bold and confident assertion that an entity is doing something all the way to saying that entity maybe could be doing something but we don’t know. It’s just a weird logical leap to me, and I felt compelled to mention it.
I’m glad I’m finally not the only one feeling this way. I’ve been seeing them aggressively pushed seemingly out of the blue for months now. Especially for what is such an awful deal and zero evidence to their claims, just citing the marketing page at face value.
Why? It’s a great search engine that a lot of people find extremely useful.
I’ve mentioned it a few times because it’s actually good.