StartPage or DDG
Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
I use the following search engines listed by priority:
- Brave
- DuckDuckGo
- Google / Bing
Sometimes the first two just don't have the right results.
I've ditched Google. I use Qwant for searching. It's about the same as Google in terms of results, I think.
Brave search. When I don't find something I try with google.
Most of the time brave search is good enough. But everyone searches for different things so idk.
Ever since switching to Brave search I've had no issues with any of my searches. The AI summary at the top of the search has been helpful sometimes too.
I want to like SearX, but I just haven't gotten any great results from it so far, and I'm not really impressed by anything that just spits out Bing results (looking at you DDG).
you.com gives excellent results, but I'm not sure how much I should be trusting them.
Brave search has gotten MUCH better and I use that pretty on the daily now.
I keep seeing good things about Kagi from our Lemmy friends here, thinking I should give that a shot
I'm still sticking with google. I check duckduckgo occasionally but always find it to be subpar.
I rotate between a handful of public SearX/SearXNG instances. I used to use Duckduckgo but after learning about the deal they had with Microsoft I completely stopped trusting them.
I'll be that weird guy using Bing! Ive signed up for Bing Rewards so I at least get some payment for the data they're collecting. Also the Bing ChatGPT feature is interesting and useful at times.
I use it too for the rewards. I had the exact same thought as you--at least they pay me for collecting data.
Brave Search on all my personal devices, even though I'm getting worse results than up to a few months ago, so as much as it pains to admit it I sometimes use Google as a fallback (and the last time I actually used Google as my main search engine was back in 2012!). I probably should use metasearch engines more, though, but have been procrastinating learning how to effectively use them for a while now.
Aside from that, I have about a dozen sites saved with search keywords on Firefox (four of them are Wikipedia in different languages, though) that I use all the time.
hey, at least you admit it's not that good! I don't think there's any reliable search engine anymore. :(
I use Bing now due to Microsoft Rewards and Bing AI
Would https://google.com/ncr help you? It's google "no country redirect"
When I setup a new browser, I always delete all the default search engines and install DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant and Startpage. If I'm looking for accurate results, I always use 2 or 3 of these. I can't say I consistently get better results using one or the other.
Brave search. The results have been better for me than most of the major players, summarizer comes in handy, and the discussions section showing forum posts on the searched for topic + top comment is useful. No native image section, but I work around that by !s bang to search on startpage when I need images. And yes, it has bangs, just like DDG.
I run my own SearXNG instance, which is a metasearch engine that shows results from a bunch of other search engines. I find it incredibly useful! It's very customizable as well
I wish I used DuckDuckGo more, but lately Google has been the default...
Been very happy with DuckDuckGo for a while now.
Startpage primarily because I was told that the Google results are better than DuckDuckGo but I never noticed any big difference except that Startpage has deactivated NSFW content by default. DuckDuckGo feels a little bit snappier and less cluttered tho.
I use one of the searxng instances or startpage.com
Searxng (searx.be) / startpage
Ecosia and DuckDuckGo
I'm using Startpage and it's been mostly fine. The biggest issue is that the "nested" results that come from Google (e.g. a forum and related posts) don't show in Startpage, it will only show the main result.
I really wanted to use something like SearXNG, but I get basically zero results whenever I use an instance, no idea if I'm missing something in how they work.
Sadly, I use Google. Their query syntax is so good and can be so precise in their results. I wish to get any search engine with that quality in their query syntax.
I have been using brave search for a few weeks, and the results seem pretty good so far.
I tried you.com for a long period of time. It has some nice ways to present content but overall I too often did not find what I was looking for so I switched back to startpage.com as unpersonalized version of Google.
Like several others, self hosted searxng instance. Suits me perfectly
I just recently started using Startpage. The results to me so far seem pretty good but im in a country where I speak the language. And I like that it doesn't save my searches. For that I use DDG.
I was using Brave until last month. They did something and now image search redirects to Google/Bing so might as well use Google I guess...
Oh and also the normal search results got really bad all of a sudden.