this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Can you tell folks here what these "proper search engines" are because I can think of like five off the top of my head that all have issues similar to Google's. Yes, that includes paid search engine Kagi.
Almost all of them have similar issues except the self-hosted ones, which are a little beyond most people's basic capabilities.
DuckDuckGo is an easy first step. It's free, publicly available, and familiar to anyone who is used to Google. Results are sourced largely from Bing, so there is second-hand rot, but IMHO there was a tipping point in 2023 where DDG's results became generally more useful than Google's or Bing's. (That's my personal experience; YMMV.) And they're not putting half-assed AI implementations front and center (though they have some experimental features you can play with if you want).
If you want something AI-driven, Perplexity.ai is pretty good. Bing Chat is worth looking at, but last I checked it was still too hallucinatory to use for general search, and the UI is awful.
I've been using Kagi for a while now and I find its quick summaries (which are not displayed by default for web searches) much, much better than this. For example, here's what Kagi's "quick answer" feature gives me with this search term:
Room for improvement, sure, but it's not hallucinating anything, and it cites its sources. That's the bare minimum anyone should tolerate, and yet most of the stuff out there falls wayyyyy short.
I stopped recommending kagi on lemmy after the umpteenth person accused me of shilling.
Maybe I should take a screenshot of the £20 leaving my account each month!
My issue is the Kagi CEO who won't take "No" for an answer and thinks he can just browbeat people over the head with his ideas until they agree with him.
He gives me every fucking reason to not give them a fucking penny because he reminds me all too well of people I have very good reason to not fucking trust.
That's not an unreasonable reason not to subscribe.
I do have a bit of a fear that the company may hit a turning point. And he'll either tone it down a bit, or they'll lose a lot of people, both staff and subs.
I am pretty content with DuckDuckGo at the moment. It's sadly still worse than peak Google was but that's enshittification for ya
DDG, i switched when startpage got bought, and it was terrible, but i stayed for the !bang and just used !g sometimes, but it kept improving while google got worse, IMO it's better than google now (and i didn't even get the AI stuff yet).