Google is bad, but people have no idea how bad search could actually get. Trying to find DPRK housing stats and DDG will only give me pages about recent canadian housing news.
DuckDuckGo is very heavily censored against leftist sources. They admitted censoring and/or de-prioritizing and downranking massively Russian sources after the start of the Ukraine conflict. So that could be a part of the problem. Yandex might be worth a try, they seem to index more non-western sources and not shove them to the bottom.
Yandex
My mind parses this as “Yandere Index”
YandereDex
Russian sources are typically not leftist? I can’t tell if you intended your 1st and 2nd sentences to be understood separately or together.
Kagi FTW 100% best search engine
Leftists are the only people who oppose NATO cheerleading over a war NATO aggression provoked and guess who’s going to be posting shit that is critical of that (typically Russian) (it’s leftists)
Yandex is really good at images. Maybe the best. Haven’t been as wowed by the web search.
We need a truth and reconciliation commission to find out, punish, and reverse the work of the people who took early 2010s google, which was somehow perfect, and intentionally fucked it all up
Well, the first step is already covered, at least.
Also like if you click second page, the results almost immediately have nothing to do with what you searched. It’s crazy how bad it’s gotten.
I’ve had searches so bad the entire first page is irrelevant to what you searched for and you have to go deep into several pages to find what should have obviously been the first.
It’s so bad I can’t comprehend how they’re achieving it. I guess the methods of identifying pages have just been so scrambled and manipulated that the algos just pick up the meta language and not really content anymore, so there’s a coherence there but it doesn’t necessarily relate much to your actual search objective anymore?
I will always suggest Searx. It’s a meta front-end, filters out all the AI garbage and ads. FOSS and self hostable but there’s plenty of public instances to try. You can customise which engines it uses, although what’s available to choose from is up to the instance maintainer.
Came here to say this but you beat me to it. So instead I will second the Searx suggestion.
Searx (technically now a newer development called Searxng) will grab results for you from just about any other search engine but it goes a long way towards anonymizing you to those search engines and helps break their ability to fingerprint and track you, removes ads, etc. If you use invidious for youtube (you should!) or nitter for “x” (xcancel is a nitter instance), then Searxng is kinda like that but can also aggregate all the search engines for any search you do.
You can host your own private instance which I’m told is easy, or you can use public instances, which I do. I do have to admit that a lot of the public instances get rate limited a lot, so you might get a few “0 results returned” before it works, if you have it set to use for example google and bing when both have rate limited that public instance. You can set it to use other engines at that point or try other public instances. Usually it works fine “out of the box” but sometimes it does take a little tweaking to get it the way you want. Mostly this is because search engines don’t like people using searx and try to thwart it because it ruins their raison d’etre: tracking you and advertising at you. But that’s what makes it all the more worth it. And if you set up your own private instance, then it greatly reduces or eliminates many of the issues that the high volume public instances have to deal with like rate limiting, and of course gives you full control over how you want your personal instance to work.
And yes, !bangs work on it, but you should use two exclamation marks instead of one, like “!!w beanis” to search wikipedia for beanis. Dorking more or less works to the extent that it works on whatever the target search engine is. If you’re using searx to search on an engine that doesn’t recognize boolean search operators, then it’s not going to return results as if the operators do work. But it will work when set to search on engines that do recognize them.
Setup is indeed very easy, I run a local-only instance on my PC at home. Been a while since I did it but from memory I think it’s just a docker one-liner. You are right that rate limiting can be an issue and that’s part of the reason I spun up my own.
+1
I thought about building a network of these to try and avoid rate limits. Not sure how viable that is, maybe its just a host your own type of service.
It’s easy enough to host your own, and if you’re just using it like a normal person you’re not going to hit a rate limit. Goog can’t really tell the difference between you hitting it from a browser vs. you hitting it from searx.
You could probably either proxy outbound requests through a bunch of different boxes if you really wanted to, or maybe there’s some frontend that queries public instances in like a round-robin kind of way (a meta-meta engine, I guess), but honestly I suspect that’s more work than just spinning up your own.
iirc the searx engine config yaml accepts a list of searexes too. Keeping the list updated with working instances is annoying tho. Maybe less annoying with friends so you don’t have to guess about reliability.
That is incredibly useful. I didn’t know it did that but it stands to reason, it’s just another search URL after all. In that case it’d probably be fairly trivial to just scrape the list at searx.space and jam it in the yaml file say once a week.
I’m sure it’s a config issue on my part, but I self host it and my internal instance gets like instantly rate limited on a bunch of services, so i often still use public instances since I can’t get a very good breadth of engines on my self host one.
Not sure how to use this all results were in Russian or Cyrillic
The list lets you find an instance by country, then after that results depend on which engines are enabled. Check the settings on whatever instance you select.
“visit in anonymous view” is a cool feature
You’re right, I switched to duckduckgo a couple of years back out of frustration with google and at this point I fully cannot find anything using duckduckgo search. Even directly quoting text in the search bar won’t get me the result if it isn’t just like wikipedia.
Apparently y’all haven’t heard of 100searchengines.com
If you haven’t check it before now, you’re welcome for bringing you back to results that actually show you things you’re looking for instead of complete garbage. Enjoy.
back in my day there were only 37
🤣
It gives results but also uses google redirect links soooo
At least it works and doesn’t serve me AI slop for every result soooo 🤷
I’ve started paying for kagi, works pretty well
Can you dork with it?
Straight-up dorkin’ it in my search queries.
Nice, thank you! Good to know! I’ve been looking for an alternative for quite some time.
I don’t understand the question
https://github.com/chr3st5an/Google-Dorking
Advance search techniques… For reasons.
I try dorking but I feel like googke just ignores that shit now or somethinf. Ill -reddit and it’ll just show me more reddit, fuckin bastard google
Yeah, they either give back shit results or they’ll trigger a captcha claiming suspicious activity. Google’s just an advertising trap now, barely usable.
Kagi is free to try, i can’t answer that from experience
Speaker got me, it does.
Same here. Kagi is a breath of fresh air and works as well as google used to work many years ago.
I stopped paying for Kagi because they kept blocking my VPNs.
If DDG is going (gone) downhill, which search engines are preferred on SearXNG that won’t be milar or worse for bias? I’m liking reports for Kagi but it’s a cost I don’t need just now.
Self hosted searxng has replaced it for me. Without DDG. For work, back to google. Cause it’s work, idgaf. DDG has turned to trash.
