I don't understand why lots of you answer with chatGPT. It's not a search engine! And you shouldn't use it like a search engine.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I can see a usecase for where you don't know where to start or search with, and then verify with actual searches.
I recently used it to explain for a friend what is the difference between wheat and ale beer, and it gave a very good summary. With DDG I might not get a direct explanation and would need to read a few articles and then word them in a comprehensive way.
If you pay there's an option for chatgpt4 that can use Bing to search. There's also various plugins that can let it interact with all sorts of additional data sources. Not that you should use it like a search engine exactly, but it can be useful for search if you configure it correctly and understand that it doesn't "know" anything.
Bing has gpt 4 for free, there's a button for it on bing.com. I do pay for GPT Plus but there's no web search option there for me, I have to use bing for that.
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Currently down for updates, but does a great job of avoiding SEO abuse/blog spam/etc. Takes you back to the earlier days of the internet when it felt like there were more forums/individual sites/etc. They’re still out there, just hidden under all the junk.
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I run my own searx instance
As someone who's only recently heard of SearXNG, why searx and not SearXNG?
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Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.
How do you come by with just 300 searches per month? I tested the trial period and used up the 100 searches in just a couple of days
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Self-hosted Searxng. It's shared to multiple people which kills a lot of the usefulness in Google or others trying to track my instance.
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I use mostly either ddg or brave search. I miss the google of pre 2010, when the majority of its results were good.
I also use Yandex whenever I'm looking for pirate stuff, the only engine that doesn't block those kinds of results.
Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use. Switched away from Google for privacy reasons and haven't missed it a bit.
I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.
I've been using DuckDuckGo since, at least 2010, maybe earlier. If its results aren't up to snuff, I'm not aware of that because they're what I'm used to. I fall through to Google ( !g) if I think there might be more out there. The bang commands are so good. I use DDG as my main search in my search bar and then I can use the bang commands to get to whatever specialized search I want from there. It's a meta-search-engine.
Are you using DDG in addition to Kagi because of Kagi's limited number of searches per month, or because DDG does something better?
I'm a bit conflicted about Kagi because $5/month is a plausible price, but the limited number of searches seems like it would add an extra step of, "Do I want to use my limited search resource on this search?" to every search, which is an unwanted extra bit of friction.
I use DDG because I'm still not decided on whether or not Kagi is worth it. If there's no significant difference in the results returned by DDG, why pay for Kagi?
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I'm still looking for a search engine that doesn't use data from my IP address to provide targeted results. In the meantime, I've gone back and forth between using SearXNG instances and using Startpage, but there's really not a decent search engine in existence, from what I can tell.
@SemioticStandard Kagi. I used DDG for a long time, and Kagi is strictly better. Specifically, it’s very snappy and I trust the privacy guarantees even more since I’m a paying customer.
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I've ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down) without looking for Reddit results all the time.
Just simple searches like "Best gaming headphones" or "Realtek Driver Download" and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you'd like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit or archive.org versions), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called "Lens", which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I've defined - see image.
Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
(copied from another thread I replied to)
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Thanks for making me aware of Kagi, I've been trialing it and getting decent results is a breath of fresh air in a world of blogspam and LLM garbage.
I've been using Ecosia for a while and liking it. I think the results are usually better than Google and the image search is way more useful, still gives you direct links to the image files. Though most importantly I like planting trees.
i use brave search (even if i'm on firefox), it gives good results while having an independent index
I use DuckDuckGo, but mostly as a "terminal to the internet". In a few keystrokes i've opened a new tab, navigated to the homepage (https://start.duckduckgo.com/), then used a Bang to do a direct search inside the particular site or thing i need. For many things specially tech questions i do fall back to Google though
I use DuckDuckGo. Including using their browser on iOS and windows.
DuckDuckGo. Its results are much better than Google's in my experience. Whenever I Google something, all I get is a list of online stores I've never heard of, and they have nothing to do with my search input.
For me the main thing that makes me stick to DDG is the bangs - adding for example !wiki in the beginning of a search term to search directly in Wikipedia. It is a game changer, especially as I often need to search in specific sources for work. For example, !scholar for direct access to Google Scholar is great.
Whenever I think Google will provide better results it's as easy as !g - but I am also experiencing that the results are increasingly unhelpful (often geared towards shopping rather than information).
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I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search
Google, duck duck go when I don't want to see ads for days based on what I'm searching, Bing and Perplexity when I want to avoid doing a series of searches to learn something.
I exclusively use AltaVista.
DuckDuckGo, but mostly because of the !bangs. I do 90% of my searches through StartPage (!s), and the rest directly on a few websites (Wikipedia, YouTube, Arch wiki...).
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I've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for the past couple of years. I occasionally fall back to Google.
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DuckDuckGo for general searches
Google for image searches
Google maps for local businesses (including their website)
BingGPT for simple research answers (e.g. What door closers will fit on a Norton 1600 bolt pattern?)
Duck Duck Go too
DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn't cutting it.
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