Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn’t a clear solution to navigating the web because it’s either ai slop or the results are poor.

And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you’re looking for.

And so I told them I’d compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.

So far I have:

Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.

Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik

Ecosia: works great but relies on bing

I have tried things like qwant ect but haven’t really settled on those.

Any other suggestions?

I’d tell em to use udm14 but it’s still google so I’d rather keep that as a plan B.

OQB @FreddiesLantern@leminal.space

  • unglueclass23@programming.dev
    2·
    3 days ago

    Uruky I’ve been using them for a few months, this interview is what made me switch. It’s a small team of 2 people (a guy and his wife), they have a handful of search indexes (EUSP, Linkup, Serper, Marginalia, Mojeek, PriEco, Mwmbl), and you can customize which of them you want to use.

    I use EUSP index and I have to say it’s pretty good, it finds MOST things i’m looking for and when it doesn’t, at the bottom of the page there’s “Try with Linkup / Serper / Mojeek / Marginalia” so you can click around and see if the other indexes match something that your main one missed. And at the top there’s “Try in Ecosia / Google / DuckduckGo” (I sometimes use DDG and Ecosia).

    In the settings there’s lots of customization options for the UI.

    They’ve been clear they won’t include AI at all in this search engine.

    You can pay with crypto, cash or card.

    They are EU-based (EU servers, EU storage, EU payment processing, EU search providers) (Mojeek is based in UK, but whatever).

    They have bangs and you can enable DDG / Kagi bangs.

    You can create your own web fallback engines (like they have ddg/ ecosia/ google) by default.

    You’re not required to give out your personal details when registering, you literally only get an account number.

    5 eur / month.

    Yeah idk I just like it. It’s minimal and does what I need, they’ve been adding new features and it feels good supporting big tech independent search indexes, services.

    A year or two back when I tried independent search indexes they were all pretty bad and I concluded you can’t really avoid using Bing / Google indexes. But now? EUSP is veeery decent and in combination with the other, smaller ones they cover a lot of ground. I would say it’s in the same tier as Bing, but slightly worse than Google. But for 90% of the searches ? It’s good enough and you can always just use Ecosia when you need Google or Serper index (directly in Uruky).

    I see people mention Kagi.

    I used Kagi for 3 months when they gave me a free trial maybe a year back. It’s a good product and probably the best search engine out there. However, it’s also more expensive than Uruky (10$/ month) and more importantly they use Yandex as one of their search indexes.. They’ve also removed all mentions of this fact from their help pages. They also use brave index. You can’t choose to not use them and in general they havent been very transparent about the whole thing (as to how much they use each index)

    By the way Ecosia relies on Google, not bing. They’ve switched quite a long time ago.