I’d like to start a thread for people to share what they’re using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.

I’m doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my “stack” has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.

My (shitty and getting worse) solution:

  • DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG’s relevance has been shit for its entire existence
  • StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
  • currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it’s not easy to set up if you don’t use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with

The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn’t return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.

BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.

I’d love to hear suggestions.

tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines

  • Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    13 hours ago

    Here is a list of alternative (meta-)search engines:
    Swisscow
    Qwant
    Ecosia
    DuckDuckGo
    SearXNG
    MetaGer
    Leta by Mullvad
    Mojeek
    Kagi (Paid I think)

    Das all I can remember rn.

  • NKBTN@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Just going to give Wiby a shoutout because no-one else has. More for curiosity / surfing than research, but you definitely get unique results.

  • John@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    I like DDG but it just uses bing under the hood.

    I actually prefer Brave. (Though brave has been caught fiddling the results)

    They all kind of suck in their own way. Brave or DDG gets the job done 99%nof the time.

  • Corridor8031@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 days ago

    i am using DuckDuckGo ? am i doing something wrong lol

    most things i personally search for i have to append reddit anyway, since otherwise it feels like ai generated content anyway

  • TMKI@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 days ago

    I don’t think Qwant and Ecosia’s index has fully rolled out. They have been using it as a partial index in France and Germany starting in summer 2025 according to their FAQs on their website. So I guess it would depend where you live.

  • rozodru@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    I have my own SearXNG self hosted Instance but I’m probably going to switch it to 4get today. I’ve just noticed it getting worse and worse over time. slow, bad results, or just randomly starts 504ing when everything else (forgejo, vaultwarden, navidrome, jellyfin, Akkoma, etc) on my server continues to work fight.

    Tried some 4get instances and it’s just so damn snappy and quick.

    • oOAlteredBeastOo@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 day ago

      I noticed the same bad search issue a few weeks ago. I tried several other instances from searx.space and they all gave bad results. I reverted to DDG. I’ll have to give 4get a shot.

  • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    I’m gonna comment on my personal experience with a few search engines.

    • Startpage I stopped using because, and it took me a while to notice this, the searches aren’t included in the URL. This means if I want to bookmark a startpage search for later or find a startpage search in my browser history I can’t. This is a dealbreaker for me.
    • Qwant didn’t have advanced search tools of any kind, and it also didn’t work in Singapore (where I occasionally set my VPN to).
    • Mojeek … is not ready yet.
    • Kagi I tried for a bit but I’m not paying a subscription to an American company for search.

    Ultimately I ended back up on Duckduckgo. I think perhaps we should go back to web directories instead of search engines.

  • Special Wall@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    I also use Kagi. It has the option for AI but doesn’t shove it down your throat like other providers.

    One feature I especially appreciate from Kagi are URL redirects. I can have it automatically replace parts of the URL from any search result. For example, I have YouTube results redirect to Invidious, and Reddit redirect to redlib, without me having to replace the domain myself

    • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      3 days ago

      Last time I checked Kagi didn’t have an option for people who just do a few searches a month so it ended being too expensive for me.

      I might have to check again though😇

    • ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      0·
      3 days ago

      I forgot to include in the post that I’m too broke for Kagi, otherwise I’d have tried it already :(