What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?

  • hitagiAEnglish
    553·
    1 year ago

    Here’s my experience with some search engines:

    A Tier – Gives me the closest results.

    • Google: A classic and oftentimes, it gets what I want. A lot of the links are redirects which is annoying.
    • Kagi: It’s paid but it has a lot of features like “lenses” and “quick answer”. The results are pretty good. It gives me good articles and PDFs instead of a blogspot post.
    • You.com: The WORST UI EVER but the results are surprisingly decent. It’s pretty close to Kagi. It might actually be the same thing. It also has an AI chatbot but I don’t think it’s as good as Bing’s or OpenAI’s.

    B Tier – Gives me decent results.

    • Startpage: It used to use Google search results but they switched to Bing. It is worse than Google. EDIT: Search results are still closer to Google but they “incorporate Microsoft Bing results”. From my experience, it filters out some of Google results that were very useful for me. Their widgets (particularly the Wikipedia one) sometimes displays irrelavant information.
    • DuckDuckGo: Results are worse than Google. One time a referral link came up in one of my searches.
    • Bing: There’s no dark mode. The AI chat tool is pretty nice and is comparable to the OpenAI one (significantly better than Google’s Bard). Search results are worse than Google.
    • Yandex: Search results are similar to DuckDuckGo.
    • Ecosia: Search results are similar to the ones above.

    C Tier – Gives me poor results.

    • Brave: Search results feel so inconsistent and out of place. Maybe worse than the ones above.
    • Mojeek: Independent search engine. Results aren’t very good.

    Open Source Front Ends - Results quality varies.

    • SearXNG: It depends on which instance you’re using. Sometimes search results error out due to rate limiting but you still get results anyway. It has a lot of options and configs so it fits to your liking so you can choose which search engines you want to include.
    • LibreX: Actually one of my favorites since I’ve never encountered errors due to rate limiting but using it to search for images is terribly slow. It has a cool feature where you can add front ends like Libreddit and Wikiless. It also has a built-in torrent search engine.
    • Whoogle: The UI isn’t very good and it performs poorly on most public instances. A smaller or private instance might be worth looking into. It uses Google search results.

    F Tier – It sucks.

    • Qwant: Not available in my country.

    If anyone knows of any other search engine not in this list, let me know so I can try it out.

    • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      It used to use Google search results but they switched to Bing. It is worse than Google.

      That’d be news to me and an ad hoc comparison I just did shows results much closer to Google than Bing with results usually just locally having switched places while on Bing it’s an entirely different order.

      They do(did?) use Bing for mobile search results because daddy Google forced them to not be competitive on the platform they’re most interested in.

      • hitagiAEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Now that I’m trying it again, it actually is similar to Google’s results but it filters some of the more useful results I get from Google based on some things I’m searching up.

        We have more broadly incorporated Microsoft Bing into our results, using a unique solution specifically fitted to our privacy promise. Our collaboration with Microsoft also has enabled us to provide a superior mobile experience. You will see benefits like better search suggestions, fewer ads, and greatly improved similar image results, among others.

        https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/12727471498644-What-are-Startpage-s-enhanced-search-results-

        I don’t know of this only applies to the widges or actual search results.

    • BaumGeist@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      I can agree with the google placement if you’re assuming the searcher has experience with search operators, most of the time if I’m not wasting time crafting my search results to exclude all the SEO spam sites and Q&A sites written with the same amount of padding as a middle school book report, DuckDuckGo will give me better results than Google.

        • boredtortoise@lemm.eeEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Thanks for testing. Pinpointed the issue to ad blocking on DNS. I have no idea which domains it needs whitelisted

      • hitagiAEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        We have more broadly incorporated Microsoft Bing into our results, using a unique solution specifically fitted to our privacy promise. Our collaboration with Microsoft also has enabled us to provide a superior mobile experience. You will see benefits like better search suggestions, fewer ads, and greatly improved similar image results, among others.

        https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/12727471498644-What-are-Startpage-s-enhanced-search-results-

        I don’t know if this applies to the actual search results or the widgets. But upon checking, the results are actually still closer to Google but it filters out some results that I find useful. It also pulls up the first Wikipedia article it can find in the first page and displays it as a little widget on the side even if it’s far from relevant.

      • hitagiAEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll try it out this week when I work on my papers.