I’m trying to degoogle. I’ve heard good things about DuckDuckGo and I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and it’s pretty solid. But I’m just wondering what the Lemmy/Piefed community prefer for a search engine.
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Ecosia mainly, I used to use kagi which I liked but I wasn’t sure it was worth the cost although I was thinking about using it again as I really like their small web stuff.
I also used yandex for piracy stuff, I think they ignore all DMCA takedowns or something so it’s much easier to find stuff on it
NoAI DuckDuckGo (noai.duckduckgo.com)
it has decent enough results and disables the unwanted AI features (I don’t want to prompt an LLM whenever I search something)
I am willing to switch to something else, right now DDG is good enough.
TIL about that option, thanks.
I think I have it set to only prompt when I click the button, which is the same domain, and still leaves the option
I’m using paid Kagi subscription, and it makes searching for stuff feel like it used to before Big Tech broke the internet. I can actually find what I’m looking for again.
The “SlopStop” feature is worth it alone, but I love how I can choose what types of results and sources to prioritize.
10/10 Highly recommended.
DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes
Quite a lot of the time. It’s pretty damn awful, actually.
Kagi. Every once in a while I tried out Qwant, but it’s just not there yet.
Can you describe why you think its better than Qwant or DDG? I tried it but didn’t felt that much difference to have an account for search engine.
being able to block/downrank/uprank domains from search results, being able to block AI from search results, rewriting URLs (for example, reddit.com to old.reddit.com), kagi translate, bangs (ddg has them but qwant does not)
I don’t know how those search engines evolved, but last time I checked (a few years ago), Qwant was the worst search engine ever, and DDG was pretty average. I don’t know how Kagi works, but it’s good for every query. I usually don’t recommend it because it’s expensive ($10 a month) but it really changed how I work, especially for programming topics.
As an example, Qwant still uses w3schools as the reference for C++, which is some “4chan trolling” level of stupidity.
I’ve used DDG for the past 7 years or so. When ever I don’t find what I’m looking for I just add !g to the search term and it Googles it for me.
Kagi for well over a year now
DuckDuckGo: good all-around search engine
Searx: when I’m feeling extra FOSS
Kagi: when I need Google from 10-15 years ago. Has a cool “lenses” feature that let’s you target the type of sites the results come from. (Kagi is one of those rare moments where I use something proprietary because the more open alternatives can’t meet my needs yet.
Kagi. Well worth the money.
The only independent search engines that support my native Japanese are Google, Bing, Brave, and Yep.
Of these, I generally search using Brave, and if I’m not satisfied with the results, I search again using DuckDuckGo.
I don’t use Yep because of its strict bot restrictions.Also, on the rare occasions when I need to do an exact match or a search using
site:, for some reason, Brave and DuckDuckGo are useless, so I reluctantly use Google, which is a shame.
As someone living in Japan, I do not recommend QWant, which is recommended in this comment section.As I’ve commented before, this is because the service geoblocks countries that have non-Western languages as their official languages.
I’m brazilian, our official language is Portuguese, and Qwant is not available here either. It seems they don’t understand that people can speak two or more languages? They could just put an “English-only results” warning, but ok.
same for korea, qwant used to work but they seemed to have blocked access around 2023 or so
As someone studying Japanese, oooo that’s awesome I gotta check them out! :D
If I had the money, I would at the very least try Kagi, but for now I’m just surfing with DuckDuckGo using their “noai(dot)duckduckgo(dot)com” link. Auto turns off their dumb “duck ai” nonsense and using their filters to try and hide genAI images.
I also looked it up because I was curious and if the source is correct, I learned that the “noai” part of that link is a subdomain.
DuckDuckGo.
Like others have said, there’s really no getting around that Google has the best search engine from a functional standpoint. So I use DuckDuckGo for my personal reasons, but if I’m dissatisfied with the results, I will open up a “private” browser and do a Google search.
Edit: I’ll add that this doesn’t happen very often. The last time I had to do this was maybe a month and some change ago.
I use Qwant and Ecosia.
Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.
For those who don’t know, most “independent” search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they’re still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.
Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they’re collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they’re already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.
I use DDG as well. Have for years now, it’s actually gotten to the point where it gives similar if not better results than Google Search for me now.
DDG is good enough for me.
