Qwant
this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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Programming
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I've been using Qwant as well and it's actually really refreshing. No nonsense and I feel like I get better results than Kagi and Google and Bing.
I love it so far.
There are some times when Qwant returns bad results where I'll revert to Google. Just to find worse results...
Jokes aside, Qeant handles most queries well, even local stuff in my native language.
You.com was pretty good for highly technical topics, otherwise Google
Edit: use a VPN from the EU for Google, you'll get better search results
Phind.com is pretty good for programming stuff, it's AI but it cites it's sources.
Ddg. It's shit but it's okay for my purposes most of the time.
Google. I usually find what I want with it, although it has gotten worse over time.
I tried DDG a few years ago and only found it worse. Like, there was a clear performance impact with me using DDG vs me using Google.
Same. Once every few months I give DDG another try for a week or two, but between their strictly inferior and more spam riddled results and the absolutely grotesquely bad Apple Maps they integrate, it's back to Google pretty quickly.
It's like that study found out: Yeah, Google results have objectively gotten worse. But so have Bing's and by extension DDG's, and more so than Google's.
absolutely grotesquely bad Apple Maps they integrate
You can use !maps query to workaround that. I typically end up using DDG as a frontend to other sites through its bangs syntax.
E.g.
!maps x location to y location
But yeah, if normal DDG results don't work for you it's probably not a huge gain.
I used DuckDuckGo a couple of years ago, but they added their own blacklist of sites (pretty stupid), and for my language it started returning crappy generated spam sites instead of relevant results. They shouted at the top of their lungs that for my language they simply index the results from Yandex, but this is a lie, they are different.
StartPage gave the best results, but they introduced a captcha that I got every damn request.
I'm currently using SearXNG, which collects results from Google. And these are damn normal results, unlike other search engines that consider themselves the smartest and edit the results.
Shameless self promo: I was upset by this as well so I’m working now on a curated search engine just for anything related to webdev. It focuses on blogs and docs. No BS, just high quality sources.
Also it’s hosted on a PC in my living room ;)
I feel like I see this question come up now and then across the communities I'm in, and there's always a debate over search engines lol. Anyway, to answer the question, I use Kagi for its custom rankings (and, more recently, Wolfram|Alpha integration, which I've found more useful than I expected it to be).
Because Google has gone to shit and everyone's desparate for a replacement.
If you mean for programming specifically, I... don't, really. At most it would be for a quick sanity check on syntax in a language I don't write often, for which Google is fine. But otherwise I rely on documentation and search features of the various language/tool-specific websites.
Presearch, Perplexity, and occasionally DDG.