Lots of talk about which search engine to use; surprisingly little talk about extensions.
Block or Highlight Search Engine Results is my personal recommendation. Whichever SE you use, when you see a result that’s AI slop or a garbage website like Forbes, just add
bullshit.comto the filter, set to hide, and you’ll never see that trash in a search result ever again.Be diligent about it for a good week or so, and your search result quality will absolutely explode, whether your using Google, DDG, or several others.
Using a search engine that isn’t saturated with ads and AI trash also solves this problem.
I stopped using Whoogle (Privacy engine using Google search) because of the bad search results. Google’s fault of course.
Trying SearxNG now.
Same with startpage because google indexing becoming horrible.
But I have some cons. with searxng, earch quality becomes horrible when adding too much sources, and I decided to go with ddg.SXNG has been great for me. Submitted a PR to add more quick-answers, too.
Which other trustworthy search engines are there? And I don’t mean some different frontend or a meta search engine like ddg, sp, kagi, searx(ng), etc… that mostly just use googles, bings or even yandex and beidu results?
Ages ago I configured and hosted yacy for myself, but that was a different time… Are there any real alternatives? With mayor internet companies like cloudflare, social media sites and many others restricting the access to the net and information, searching becomes more and more impossible if you aren’t a huge corporation…
FYI kagi does its own indexing, it’s not just a frontend
The two criteria I suggested were “not saturated with ads and AI trash” (technically just the latter would satisfy OP’s problem), and DDG meets both of those with no problem. Its AI “assistant” and its ads can both be trivially disabled. I use DuckDuckGo because I love its frontend and because it gives me fewer problems than Google did. I’ve only ever used alternative search engines that piggyback off the major ones (as you listed: DDG, Startpage, and SearX), so someone else would have to answer that for you.
Well, you and I just have a different understanding of “search engine” then. For me a search engine is something that doesn’t forward queries to third parties.
Got any recommendations?
DuckDuckGo
I don’t know if Bing’s search results are better than Google’s.
They all suck.
Startpage if you like Google, DuckDuckGo if you like Bing.
Kagi
Gotta say, Kagi has been great. It’s helped me a lot in work just by Being able to prioritise search Results and rank certain sites higher
Kagi has an AI search option which IIRC is on by default – or at least was at one point – where it’ll try to also synthesize an answer and stick it in a box with the results, but you can just turn it off in your preferences. I have it off.
There may be a day when we have AI assistants that are so good that their summaries are better than looking at the original source, but I’d put a high bar on that, and think that we’ve got a way to go.
It’s off by default, but activated when you end your search query with a question mark. That option can be turned off.
Searx.space
Lets you turn it off for good…until Google removes that feature
Imagine Google killing the searching feature.
You talk as if it is yet to happen.
Yeah imagine.
It would be great if it did anything for SEO, but alas.
To add it to Firefox search, open about:config and add a boolean value
browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefreshset totrue. This will allow you to manually add search engines. Then open the search settings and click add. Set the URL tohttps://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s, give it a name and click “Add Engine”.
I still like the idea of not using google search as my defacto standard, however once a month I may do an actual google search and this is a nice backup.
Thank you for your work
Tried this and it returns as site not found
As in, forever for good, or the “Microsoft” “for good” user settings paradigm?
Good old six month old articles getting reposted, yup, yup, yup.
Anyone know how to add it to mobile Chrome?
Edit: go to the udm14 site, then open settings/search engine, it’ll be in there. I’m not sure if you have to do a search through the site first for it to show up.
There is an addon for Firefox mobile
Am I the only one questioning the spelling of “tyre“?
Today you learned a new aspect of the British English dialect. Congrats!
They’ll be boggled by hiccough and gaol.
not everyone speaks ameican english
Is it just me or is this response the wrong response? I would have expected:
not everyone speaks bri’ish english
(that missing “r” in “ameican” inspires the use of the “improper” option here). It’s American English that uses “tire”, after all, and the rest of the Anglosphere that has “tyre”.
And it’s probably India which has the most English speakers in the world (counting it as native, second or third language)
Deus Vult!
