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- Hacker News
- I have not used it yet, but this project looks interesting to me: https://docs.searxng.org/by dml2135
- Does brave search make any sense for you?by whitefang
- Ecosia and Qwant have just started collaborating on EUSP (European Search Perspective)[1]
This could easily yield very interesting (i.e. "not just another bing proxy") results once it starts gaining traction.
I use DuckDuckGo at the moment, only because Startpage started making themselves impossible to use when they started aggressively blocking access via VPNs. As other people have already said,see `noai.duckduckgo.com` and `lite.duckduckgo.com` which might address your specific concerns.
If you are a Mullvad user, there is also Mullvad Leta[2], which has been security audited[3].
I might shift more towards Ecosia/Qwant.
[1] https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp-germany-rollout/ [2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/introducing-mullvad-leta-a-searc... [3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/16/security-audit-of-our-...
by traceroute66 - Interesting. I'll give Ecosia/Qwant a go than as I'm not really interested in opting-out of a bubble.
Edit: hum, sadly, Qwant integration to Firefox seems to be broken at the moment.
by ldng - Leta told me it was shutting down months ago. leta.mullvad.net doesn't exist anymore. I'm sad, because it was a great search engine I could trust.by godshatter
- StartPage doesn't only block VPN access, but also "regular" connections. And what's worse, it doesn't ask to solve some captcha, but blocks you completely and only shows the form where you can say why you think they are wrong.
- Why not simply go to DDG settings and disable AI if you dislike it ? (There they will also tell you about https://noai.duckduckgo.com )by mlok
- You're reading that incorrectly. I disapprove of the bubble effect.
I specified I'm not interested in chabot because I'm looking for a search engine and some people tend to conflate the two. I prefer first hand information, hopefully filtered for spam and slop but not "tailored" by a bubble that is more often mistaken than not.
by ldng - https://search.brave.com
other things that came up in a search not mentioned in post yet (that I have heard of before):
mojeek or yacy - are these any good?
list of searx instances (I've used some of these a while ago but not recently so idk of their quality currently): https://searx.space/
by erelong - Mojeek is okay, but I think I'd struggle to use it as my primary search. I do include it in my personal metasearch results though, and find it worth paying for their API access (at my usage it's only about $20/year). If a page shows up in both Brave & Mojeek, it's probably a good one.
I thought I'd tried Yacy, but apparently not - it's a distributed search.
SearX is by asciimoo, the same person who has moved on to making Hister. asciimoo just posted about it here a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159436
I feel like Seirdy has the definitive list of search engines, though the list is from 2021:
https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
by SyneRyder - I have roughly the same path as you through default search engines over the years and recently left duckduckgo for ecosia. It's the best alternative I've found and after about a week or two it became second nature just like the ones that came before it. If I don't find what I'm looking for I may still jump over to Google (via incognito window)
p.s ecosia does have their annoying obligatory ai chat bot that attempts to answer things which i could do without but i just mostly ignore it
- i also use ecosia. actually, ddg, startpage, kagi, or self-hosted search engines are just anonymous queries to google and bing. brave has its own index, but i don't have a very positive impression of the brave browser. so if everything will eventually return to google and bing anyway, why not look at it from a different perspective and use it for reforestation. ecosia's policy is still to send ip addresses to partners like google and bing, but that's just the IP address, not the user profile. google might know where the query is coming from, but it doesn't know who i am. i don't see much point in that. anyway, i'm not doing anything shady; I just don't like feeling like I'm being exploited. but if i know i'm helping the community in some way or doing something meaningful just by querying through ecosia, then i'll accept revealing my ip address to them. oh, and ecosia is partnering with qwant to create its own index, and I will continue to support themby sangtd
- Hi, I work on Search at DuckDuckGo. Can you clarify what you mean by “bubblification”? Would be interested to know what has changed for you as a long-time user.by gtfiorentino
- For about the last to years I've seen the bubble effect creeping in. And, sorry no offence to you personally, to be blunt, I'm not interested in damage control.
When I make a generic search unrelated to a hobby I have and I get as top answer something about my hobby, it's a very red and very flashing red flag of bubble effect.
The nail in the coffin has happened this weekend when some un-asked for auto-correct prevented me from searching what I wanted. The moment a tool gets in the way (whatever the good intentions are), I drop the tool. And, no, most of the time DDG don't know better than me.
Several people have been calling your founder on this, here, me included, and have been ignored. DDG might not need early adopter anymore. Fine by me, I'll move on.
Sorry for the bluntness but the truth is you already lost my as a user.
by ldng - https://search.brave.com/
Feels like Google Search from 2008.
by slig - The name collision with the browser is a bit unfortunate. If you set it to default search engine in Chrome on mobile, 'Search with Brave' is very ambiguous!by cachius
- At present, it works from commend line although a little slow
No CAPTCHA, no User-Agent header required but need SNI
- Wow it really does. Thanks for sharing.by Nicholas_C
- > Feels like Google Search from 2008.
Entered search term. AI response included in the result. Ah, yes. Just like 2008.
by gaws - So many people sleep on Brave search. I agree, it's like Google from 08. It just searches for what you ask for. You can disable AI overviews. It's quick. Has a nice UI. It's free lolby grepex
- Do not use Brave for anything. Not now, now then, not ever. https://www.kevinmuldoon.com/do-not-use-brave-browser/
- Here are some "web search engines" that still work for me without CAPTCHA, Javascript or cookies
Most do not User-Agent (UA) header; some require SNI
https://api.mwmbl.org/?q=example
https://wiby.me/?q=example&p=1
https://monocles.eu/search {post-data q=example&pageno=1}
https://crowdview-next-js.onrender.com/api/search-v3?query=e...
Need SNI
https://www.bing.com/search?q=example&cc=US&first=1
Need SNI
https://www.webcrawler.com/serp?q=what&page=1
Need SNI, UA
NB. I (a) do searching from command line
(b) use UNIX filters I wrote that take SERPs/JSON as input and output SQL/simple HTML
(c) read HTML with a text-only browser that has no Javascript engine
(d) have no familiarity with Javascript-enabled, "AI"-enabled browser experience other than reading comments about it
(e) have other search strategies for finding information, do not rely on "web search engines"
- I gladly pay for Kagi because the experience is so much better that it’s worth it to me.by kstrauser
- I'll expand on a few reasons why I personally love Kagi:
- Ability to block/lower/raise/pin domains. Some examples of commonly tuned domains are here https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
- Shared custom bangs across my sessions. I can add work-specific bangs (e.g. !bug -> Jira search) and have them available across my devices.
- Regexp redirects, to automatically redirect online documentation results of some libraries to the specific out-of-date library we use in a legacy project.
All of these are not as important as knowing there is no incentive for the search engine to enshittify the results to bump some sponsored product in the results, to raise ad-heavy websites to the front to get back some precious ad revenue due to a conflict of interests, and to lower the quality of results in the hopes of making me search a second time so I am served a second batch of sponsored links.
by teroshan - Kagi is the best search experience ever. The only reason I started using it in the first place was because DDG started ignoring my quotes. Never looked back.by drcongo
- Also a happy Kagi user since 2023, and full disclosure: I participated in their crowdfund, so I have some financial stake in the company that I don't really understand.
I'm always surprised when I see people say, "I can't imagine paying for a search engine."
Imagine if you lived in a city with horrible air pollution, and you were coughing all the time and coming down with mysterious respiratory illnesses. And then you go to a friend's house in the same city who's happy and healthy, and it turns out they have an air filter they pay $10/mo for. And your reaction is, "I can't imagine paying $10/mo just to breathe air."
Pay for search! Get out of the ad-optimized Google black hole. This is a tool you use hundreds of times per month and it fundamentally influences the way you experience the web. It's something that should be a no-brainer to pay for even if it was only marginally better than Google, but I've found it significantly better than Google in most dimensions.
by mtlynch - Not only is kagi private, but it is also genuinely a much better experience than Google or DDG. However, Brave Search is great if you want something free.by chinggis
- I've been a Kagi user since 2022, and a paying user since January 2024, and I can say that I have not thought about another search engine in as much time. Absolutely worth the $10 per month.
Using a browser that defaults to another search engine is jarring. I see screenshots of what Google search results look like now, and it's like seeing the neighborhood you grew up in with shuttered storefronts and mouldering houses.
by mrtomservo - Kagi has so completely replaced other search engines for me that their appearance in other people’s browsers is disconcerting.by Arubis
- Rather than make another top-level comment, adding here that Kagi is a better experience for me than Google or DDG. Not perfect, and I wish they would lean even harder into pure search (they're also developing AI features), but still an improvement over alternatives.by colinhb