this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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I would say that there isn't currently a "best alternative" but rather there is a small group of alternatives that each seem to have "use cases" as it were (shocker, kind of how it used to be in the 90s/00s before Google dominance). But even from person to person, people disagree on what the best use case for each is.
There's some focused more on "privacy" like DuckDuckGo and searX.
I've heard Bing has pretty good results for anything AI related for all Microsoft's investment in OpenAI.
I've heard good things about Qwant for music searches.
Someone else here in this thread just brought up Mojeek, which is supposed to be also privacy focused but includes searching by "emotion."
Presearch is decentralized, but I haven't looked "under the hood" of how its decentralization works.
Startpage is Google search results but behind a proxy so Google isn't getting your info when you search.
I mean, it seems like there's a lot of decent alternatives. I wouldn't be surprised if what's left of the shell of Yahoo! started investing in trying to outperform Google at this point.
Kagi has worked REALLY well for me for all topics, but it is a paid service...
I am constantly evangelizing Kagi to all my tech friends. Thankfully I don't use mint or do CrossFit otherwise I'd be 3 for 3 and lonely. That said, it is really nice to have actual search results again. I toggle over to DDG when I have more ad based results in mind but avoid Google Search at all costs.
You know the old saying, "you get what you paid for."
I've had a lot of issues with Bing, although it may have improved since I was really using it. AI has a tendency to "hallucinate," which is a problem if you are interested in results that well... exist.
I've heard far more people using it for helping with simple coding exercises and helping them approach coding problems than I have heard of people using it for research.
I wouldn't be doing much of any research through AI for exactly that reason myself. It hallucinates too much.
So, like I said, it depends on what you're using each one for. People seem to be having success with Bing and programming, but less so with Bing and anything actually human-life related.
Time to bring back dogpile methinks
Thanks for the info.
Is DDG just straight Bing results but private and maybe minus AI stuff?
It's just a bit more complicated than that:
So they use some in-house tools and they source other results "largely" from Bing.
In other words:
I fucking hate this this is a thing again... We got past this because it was fucking stupid to have to swap between AltaVista, Askjeeves, Yahoo, etc.
Now we're literally at the same point. Just like with streaming services and cable.
At this point I just think the average person is a moron and when enough of them adopt something it goes to shit.
This might just be the best solution to keep things slightly more honest online though. With SEO targeting THE single search engine, it'll forever get gamed by irrelevant/ad based results. If everyone uses different search engines then SEO starts to fall apart