It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.
Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.
- Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
- Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
- Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
- Yandex: https://yandex.com/
If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?
EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.
Come on over to Kagi! You do have to pay but I use a search engine dozens of times per day so I’m not too bothered by it.
I’ve heard a lot of great things about Kagi, though the search limit and subscription is a little off-putting. A self-hosted Kagi would be amazing though!
Kagi has a free trial, 100 searches for free, so you can try it out and see if you like it or not.
Why would they do all that work to create a better search engine than Google and give it away for free? What is going to pay their bills?
Google pays their bills by selling your data and spying on your searches, not to mention they are morally corrupt. Kagi pays their bills with your monthly sub. Seems a lot better.
I’m worried eventually even Kagi will get enshittified. It has been a common trend that almost always occurs. Open source is the only way to ensure stability. Conflict of interest is what leads to companies either overcharging, or even accepting to get bought out.
Don’t get me wrong, Kagi seems to be a great company thus far! But for something as important as search it would be best to have an open source solution.
Probably they will, but it could take a long time. Valve is still good as an example of a company that managed to not become crap.
Open source is the only way to provide stability? Can you explain more about this?
Valve is great! Private and non-profit organizations give me some hope for a better internet one day.
Regarding Kagi, there are other potential concerns with privacy, data leaks and price gouging as well. The Patriot Act and Snowden’s leaks have shown that companies will lie in their privacy policy to appeal to authorities even if they claim they are not storing information. All your health related searches, sensitive personal details, private life, etc is also always linked to your payment method waiting for a potential data leak if they are lying. (Or a copy is just sent to five eyes)
All that is to say, be wary of trusting your privacy to companies. Monetization is a powerful motivator!
You can pay with bitcoin, which might help keeping the account entirely anonymous for some.
After that power company got blackmailed in the American South and extorted for like 40000 Bitcoin, which they paid…but then within 24 hours the FBI had recovered all of it…which is something no one was supposed to be capable of doing, I’m going to go ahead and say Bitcoin anonymity is compromised.
That means the FBI or DHS has devoted the computational power necessary to track every.single.bitcoin.transaction and then indexed it all well enough to cross reference against metadata.
Bitcoin is as secure as they allow it to be. It’s most likely allowed for the same reason the Tor network is, because it’s an avenue to move resources or information to undercover assets overseas.
At this point, I’ve come to expect that all of the products I like are going to be ruined at some point, so it’s about establishing enough independence to more easily transition to the next service.
Kagi’s great, and I’ll worry about finding a better search engine once it gets worse, but I don’t expect that to happen before my next renewal, so I’m happy.
Self hosting is smart! Usually good things always come to an end, at least if they are not open sourced.
Plus self hosting an index big enough and fast enough for a useful search engine is ridiculous.
They now have unlimited searches for $10/mo. That’s what got me to try it out.
You are correct though. I really do not like having all of my search history tied to my credit card (and then me). What helps me justify that is that instead of me being the product like google, by paying I’ve become the customer. Hopefully that incentivizes keeping them on the up and up.
I did come across searnxg in this thread. It looks like that can be self hosted so I’m gonna give that a try as well.
That’s expensive as shit, what the hell.
Yeah, you may be fine with the $5 plan, but that’s the lowest tier available.
Afaik they are not really running a profit yet, just expanding, so that’s an eye opener to how expensive it is to run a search business and how much value Google and others estimate they get from your personal information.
For now though their user base seems fairly much leaning towards business users that can defend this expense as part of becoming more effective professionally. Hopefully over time they’ll grow large enough to provide cheaper plans for regular persons while staying privacy focused and ad free.
I did 1300 queries which I think would put it at .007 cents per query. Sounds reasonable to me.
Not when they collaborate with brave. Fuck that!
They don’t “collaborate” with Brave, just use its search API.
The owner of Kagi is a homophobic piece of shit.
Just use searxng.
If you are going to look for perfect companies, you will look forever, and probably use Google while you are looking.
It’s not worth it. Just use something better than Google even if it’s flawed, because everything had flaws.
Don’t give money to homophobes, we have an open source and better alternative already.
Kagi isn’t homophobic. Apparently the “controversy” is that it employs brave search as well; which is indeed made by a company with a homophobic ceo.
Though by that logic virtually everyone in the world is. Because at some point in time, in some place, someone built a piece of modern civilization upon knowledge or resources belonging to a homophobic person, I’m fairly sure.
No, that’s a seperate controversy. The Kagis owners views became talked about a lot more during that event though.
So many people here are quick to defend and normalise homophobia, yet refuses to just use an open source free alternative that’s without this baggage.
Are you sure none of the developers of the open source free alternative aren’t homophobic, transphobic, or in some other way bad people?
Can you link to some evidence?
I think it’s perfectly understandable that some people are homophobes, so it doesn’t worry me. You still have people being afraid of black people in this age even.
You can dislike that of course, but that’s the real world. You can walk up to any older person and they are likely to be a lot less open to gay marriage than a younger person also.
You interpret that as them being hostile. I think it’s more about being afraid of something that doesn’t feel natural to them.
No it’s not. It’s not a justifiable position. It’s not unexpected sadly, but it is not understandable because it’s not a position based on anything other than ingrained hatred and fear
Yeah, get fucked mate :)
Where did you get that from?
It’s all over the Mastodon side of the Fediverse, shouldn’t be too hard to find with a quick search. I’m not at my pc atm so cbf using a phone to find some links sorry.
The controversy was about Kagi using search API from Brave, whose CEO is supposedly homophobic. Not Kagi’s CEO himself being homophobic.
No, it is also the Kagi founder as per the Mastodon topics.
Can you show some evidence of that?
The sources I find are solely from mastodon threads, and date from this month and the Brave thing. This is the best thing I’ve found
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111707573907442638
So Kagi’s founder not wanting his company policy to be influenced by the personal beliefs of the CEO of a different company is somehow “homophobic”?