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?

  • hitagi (ani.social)@ani.socialEnglish
    3·
    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.