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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
The modern internet is getting filthier by the day. Gone are the days where independent software used to be a thing I suppose.
Oh, idk. The entire internet and supporting infrastructure pretty much runs on opensourced software. When you're talking about a search engine tho, unless you have a data center, a huge pile of cash, and a willingness to part with most of it, search engines are expensive to run.
We're going to have a lot of data centres sitting idle when the AI bubble bursts.
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" while giving an honestly insane quota of AI use (ex. if user pays 10$: 10$ - 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.
"internet indexer" should really be a government / EU / UN sponsored public utility thing. And then you have front ends that can improve the search query and filter and sort the results.
I don't know how much it would cost / how large a data center it would take to cache the web pages like google does. But there is just no reason to have so much wealth / advertising drain from the public for such a fundamental thing.
Agreed. The internet is a utility at this point. Its required for many things included services the government runs already.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
No problems with my SearXNG here at all (just have to look into Qwant):
I like SearXNG,brave search and mojeek. I understand the controversies with Brave but it's the only good one I can find.
I replaced SearxNG with degoog on my server. Feels very much like Google, yet it is not. I did enable Google for search results and image, but it refuses to work (good). Am using DuckDuckGo and Startpage instead, through degoog, of course.
I run SearXNG and haven't looked back honestly, could never get on with Whoogle's UI
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.
SearXNG works flawlessly....