I used google for most of my life, for the past couple months I’ve been using brave search, but I still end up using google often because google images is far better than brave search images. I’m also worried that maybe brave search isn’t the best choice. What would you guys recommend?
I’ve been using Ecosia, it’s basically Google results, but with more privacy, and they invest the revenue in tree-planting projects.
Anyone of the many SearXNG instances is your best choice for balancing privacy and quality results. It’s open source, sources multiple search engines which you can control, is anonymous, and provides solid results. Here’s a list of active SearXNG instances: https://searx.space/
All of them at once: SearXNG.
It aggregates results from whichever you select.
Stop using search engines and start using ai. Especially ai that links to sources is much better than weeding out the heavily influenced search results. Using ai is like opening 10 search results finding the relevant sources and comparing them all to bother the information down to a digestible nugget.
Stop using search engines and start using ai
I will when we have AI.
Do you know which AI to use?
Every time i tried it, it gave me wrong information or combined outdated information with current one
I’ve gotten pretty good results from Perplexity. The responses contain links to sources, Wikipedia style, which enables me to verify the answers in the AI generated response.
I use and recommend Qwant or DuckDuckGo
I have used brave search which was really good I really liked the ai search although i moved away from it after seeing how bad google ai search was (saying things like its a good idea to eat rocks due to not being able to recognise satire) and I managed to get brave to do the same thing with a different onion article so i dont really trust any ai search now. At the moment I use searx it’s incredibly private especially if you are willing to self host (I am not) and you have so much customisation you can use any search index so you don’t have to worry about bad results.
Qwant also seams really good although I haven’t tried it, same with ecosia especially if you like planting trees although I use an ad blocker so that doesn’t work for me.
Imo there are so many great free browsers it’s not really worth paying for a browser.
I also don’t recommend duck duck since it used to have a tracking deal with Microsoft. It doesn’t have it anymore but I think it’s enough to lose faith in it.
Start Page. Google results without the Google.
Or duckduckgo
In 2019, the advertising/data science company System1 became the majority owner of Startpage. Based on this, I’d say it’s worth finding an alternative to Startpage.
Oh really? I’ll look more into that thanks.
I saw people mentioning an open source and self hostable search engine (SearXNG) which is cool and I tried it out but it gives not very good results. I tried searching for specific sites and it would show anything but. But it’s fine for general info.
I still don’t think there is anything else other than startpage that is as private while giving good search results. I don’t believe that startpage is collecting data on users like google/Microsoft do and I don’t think duckduckgo is as good in that regard either. It still makes sense for startpage to be owned by an advertising company since it does show ads mixed with the search results. The difference is they are not personalised or tracked to you (so they say).
So if you have any evidence of System1/startpage tracking users and collecting personalised data on users for anything other than general usage and diagnostic analytics then I think it’s fine. If you do, then I will stop using and recommending it.
Marginalia isn’t a daily driver search engine, but it specifically gets you obscure results. Pretty nifty side-engine to have.
I am paying for Kagi. Has worked well and some searched topics had been human curated so the answers are right there in the results. But it also does a good job with obscure searches, although it seems it tries to alter the meaning or context in order to show more results.
Best feature is the ability to hide from the results shit sites like Reddit or Quora.
Same - I paid last year and it just expired, so I tried Brave Search, DDG and Startpage but they weren’t cutting it for me so I’ve just gone back to Kagi.
Find a variant of Searx you like.
I use DDG but I’m always open to alternatives.
I’ve really been enjoying Kagi. They seem to have a pretty good privacy policy as well. However Searxng is probably the best for privacy since it’s self hosted.
I self host my own SearXNG instance. I use that.
Me too! Surprisingly easy to set up from docker. Like, four commands?
Including setting up docker?
Setting up docker to host a couple of containers from Linux is only a couple of commands, depending on your distro. Basically, install a few packages, create a group for docker, add yourself to that group.
Harder in Windows, probably, but I’ve never tried it.
I’ll look into it (linux). Thanks!
4get.ca lets you select your scraper among pretty much everything else listed here, and it can be themed with my preferred color scheme right out of the box, so it gets my vote.
