Free and Open Source Software

17926 readers

31 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Gaywallet@beehaw.org

alyaza@beehaw.org

Where To Find Actually Good Search Engines? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee to c/foss@beehaw.org

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm kind of tired of Google sending me to the same 3 sites whenever I search for something. If not the same 3 sites it's 7 others that are so generic and boring I just feel they're useless. It's always makeuseof, androidauthority, or whatever other sites that have useful information but I rarely feel like they are saying anything new.

I want to see the results from those small blogs that are sometimes linked here. I can't come up with one since... you know that's why I'm asking how to find them, but you know them; they talk about nerdy stuff and are not afraid to get technical in whatever topic they discuss.

Also duckduckgo and qwant do the same thing. If there is a way to curate the results to better fit my needs then that'd be great too!

top 9 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] OneRedFox@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Use a SearXNG instance for free search. Kagi for paid. We've unfortunately hit the point where this is necessary.

[–] the_third@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kagi is working for me as well. Took my Google history, calculated I'd need the top tier with my number of searches and grinded my teeth, thinking "okay, I'll see for a month". Yeah, it works just so well, so 25€ it is.

[–] Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I did their one time trial and then moved to the lowest paid tier for a month. Other than not getting ads it didn't feel much more effective than some selective search-fu with duckduckgo. Any hints or tips on making it more effective? I can see the value proposition, but couldn't justify it with the actual results I was getting.

[–] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 1 points 1 year ago

been using kagi for some weeks and so far I am satisfied. It has a subscription cost after 300 searches though. But I guess getting rid of advertisements and tracking has a price

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Have you tried https://duckduckgo.com/ . I've used them a very long time. I do not use Google search.

[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

DDG just uses Google's search engine, minus all the trackers.

[–] reka@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Where did you hear this? This isn't true. If you want google without the tracking, use StartPage (if you're using DDG this can be accessed with the !sp bang preface)

DDG uses Bing as their fallback engine but also does a lot of propitiatory indexing of its own

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

[–] anzo@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm running searxng on docker locally, and set that as my search engine on Firefox. It's been awesome! I will probably start a blog and post instructions... Adding the custom search engine into about:config was kinda difficult. Other web browsers should be easier.. (e.g. Vivaldi)

[–] oxideseven@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

You can add search engines to Firefox in the address and search bar.

Go to the site you want to add, click the address bar for the drop down to show, then there will be an icon for that site with a green plus to add it.

If you use the search box it's even easier. If you're on the site the icon on the left will have the green plus symbol for it.