google search results are still kind of useful especially for non-english language queries, anyone knows a good alternative?
searxng also doesn’t really seem to work these days…
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All of this when you get the super excellent Kagi for 10 dollars, from an actual search company that values privacy.
Its exactly what everyone wants but no, can’t pay 10 dollars I guess. :)
I’ve seen so many people say that kagi is overhyped
I replaced SearxNG with degoog on my server. Feels very much like Google, yet it is not. I did enable Google for search results and image, but it refuses to work (good). Am using DuckDuckGo and Startpage instead, through degoog, of course.
“internet indexer” should really be a government / EU / UN sponsored public utility thing. And then you have front ends that can improve the search query and filter and sort the results.
I don’t know how much it would cost / how large a data center it would take to cache the web pages like google does. But there is just no reason to have so much wealth / advertising drain from the public for such a fundamental thing.
There’s probably going to be a large data center or 10 for sale in a few years 🤞🏻
And all of them will be borderline useless for actual compute
How so? Is the hardware that special? One computer is much like the next you just have to be creative in repurposing them. Linux runs on millions of devices that a great deal of the population would consider highly obsolete. Just an example, I’m not saying that that’s the actual answer to this question. It might be, I’m just kind of completely ignorant as to what kind of hardware these companies are installing… It sounds like a lot of memory and a lot of GPU power.
Sociologically, economically and environmentally, these data centers aren’t going to be feasible. Our planet can not sustain them. You can build a nuclear energy site in every state, you will have fails and net losses, you will have nuclear, biological and chemical contamination along the way amd you will destroy lives trying to make a form of automation better.
That is what the observation I’ve had is. Is unless we put these things near propane sources or have them generating their own c02 as a coolant or having them do anything else but use water based energy even nuclear rods being soaked for steam based energy isn’t going to save the data centers it will only make things worse.
Also nuclear power plants are just massive targets for enemies. Right now it’s airforce bases and potential silos, you add nuclear power plants into the mix and have those in major civilian areas that’s now something an enemy can leverage. Bet you all never thought of that one.
I think we will see the effort of Ai die out and it will be the world coming back to its senses and it’ll be one for the history books.
The future will be like, we gave up artificial intelligence because our planet would get fucked badly.
It’s not meant for this planet and trying to make it work out is a fatal, futile, worthless endeavor.
I think you explained it well… My father got let go from GE when their nuclear power plant business collapsed.
I call us a nuclear family as a bit of dry humor. That said I still hold out some hope for it as a viable means of energy production. The two key meltdowns that took it off the game board were preventable human error.
Chernobyl is an environmental nightmare… but largely caused by combination of ignorance and hubris. Three Mile Island could have gone much worse… nobody died, no significant contamination. More recently Fukushima… but again, had the backup generators been properly elevated above historical flood levels it would not have been a meltdown.
Solar has some environmental concerns that are currently being largely ignored. The panels currently used some nasty stuff that stays hidden in china where the bulk of them are produced… but there are advances in new panel chemistry on a regular basis, hopefully a few of those will scale.
Hydro can be done well, it generally isn’t, but there’s some notable exceptions, Niagara Falls comes to mind.
But ultimately all that would be a complete waste on Ai… I don’t think the reliability will ever quite get there. It has its applications, always has… but general intelligence isn’t really one of them, IMHO. That said I know scores of people that are not even 92% accurate, so who knows? ;-) I certainly wouldn’t mind a robot slave to do my chores… but Ai isn’t really the issue there. You don’t need a “thinking machine” to do laundry and vacuum. Thought I suppose you didn’t need an Android either…
Robot vacuums seem to work quite well, and once someone makes an affordable automatic washing machine capable of being loaded with a hopper and spitting nicely folded clothes out the other end you don’t need an anthropomorphic robot. The value there is only in adapting to a world of appliances built for bipeds.
But as humans (in the royal sense) we do a lot of dumb things that could more easily be handled with a phone call/email/video chat.
Basing anything on a finite resource like natural gas is ultimately the wrong idea… Hopefully, we perfect something better, I really don’t care what it is as long as it’s better :-)
Agreed. The internet is a utility at this point. Its required for many things included services the government runs already.
Site maps on all websites should come back. Being able to navigate every service the site offers rather than downloading the app and using fuck all directions from a shitty side bar that lags and then you’re redirected to an Ai assistant that tells you inconvenient hours of when you can actually talk to a real human. All because the navigation is fucked up and everything is relying on automation and laziness.
searxng also doesn’t really seem to work these days…
Of note, this depends on the instance. I occasionally hop between public instances whenever one is no longer reliable. Google and friends are blocking requests from SearXNG instances because it is in their business interests to kill competition
As for alternatives, I would avoid DDG since they seem to be going a similar route as Google with a front page filled with ads and the emphasis towards their chatbot is not to my taste. Plus, DDG is hosted in the U.S., so privacy-wise it’s not as good. Startpage was purchased by an American advertising company some time ago, which isn’t great. Brave Search is also one, but they are doing some shady things on their browser with crypto and whatnot, so I don’t particularly trust them. Plus, they are an American for-profit.
Qwant and Ecosia are solid options, the former is a French for-profit and the latter a German non-profit, and they are working towards an independent European search index that is being trialled in France! Both are quite good, Qwant is shinier and magical blue, while Ecosia is simpler and earthy green.
Ecosia also uses a portion of their revenue for planting trees, which is really neat, and they are super transparent about where their earnings go!
I personally use a mix of SearXNG and Ecosia, and I sometimes use Qwant too for certain queries.
Ecosia also has an LLM which make little sense with their mission IMO
That’s fair enough (unfortunately, this is the case for most search engines aside from SearXNG instances I think)! Thankfully they do let you disable it, which is nice. I mostly like that they are quite transparent about how they operate! The planting trees thing is a nice bonus, but they certainly aren’t saints to the environment, no search engine is
Ecosia
Chat gpt says the search results are served by Bing and Google. You’re not escaping Google, just the AI.
Thus the “working towards an independent European search index” part of the comment you ignored while talking with your autocomplete bot.
Did we all forget that Google used to give give an answer at the top of the page before Ai?
No I saw it but because the question would’ve been answered by Google anyways before the gemini thing I just used chatgpt to ask it who services Ecosia like T-Mobile servicing Mint. If they took away Ai, we’d still have the answer box that Google would’ve given and then we’d still have to double check our sources.
Chat gpt says
Bro, stop. Get some help. At least check the sources it used…
Well I did double check it by simply googling my query that I asked chatgpt, and what do you know even Ecosia says it on their site
source: https://support.ecosia.org/article/579-search-results-providers
recently saw this article here, i’m not sure if ecosia is a good solution now. their results seem mostly identical to ddg/bing too though it’s occasionally better than them for some reason
qwant is good, but they geoblock certain countries including mine since 2023 or so. having to use proxy/vpn for just searching really sucks
their results seem mostly identical to ddg/bing too though it’s occasionally better than them for some reason
I believe Ecosia uses either Google or Bing search indexes depending on the region, but they are working on an independent index with Qwant that will hopefully be a good alternative! If you live in France, it’s already bring trialled!
But yeah, Ecosia is like any search engine and there is bit of greenwashing with LLMs and all. However, they are a non-profit with transparent earnings reports, and that makes them better than Google, Bing, DDG, etc. for me.
they geoblock certain countries including mine since 2023 or so
Dang, that sucks.
I’ve been using startpage.com since I’ve went back to Ubuntu. Came as the stock search engine with Vivaldi and I like how it looks and feels so I use it. I switch off between Google and startpage.
I’d been a Vivaldi user for a while too but the latest version killed Ublock Origin, so sad to say the browser is now dead to me.
I never even knew about Ublock until now. That’s fucked they wouldn’t add support for Vivaldi. It’s so versatile!!!
It’s more complicated than that. I’ll spare you, but I recommend the forks of Firefox like Librewolf, Floorp, etc.
Librewolf
Well shit. If they got a browser I gotta use it.
The modern internet is getting filthier by the day. Gone are the days where independent software used to be a thing I suppose.
A few months ago before joined lemmy I said to my friends and family, we’re going to see an open-source revolution where people are going to start going in on community based ideas. There’s nothing like it either.
Coming together to make an open source project happen is one of those things that makes my back do that happy drippy feeling because everyone gets a say and their input is heard plus a lot of people who give their input aren’t even looking for a pay, nonetheless want to be credited unless were hands-on with a project (like a coder).
Every single thing that’s open source is for the people. Everything that is closed is for the greedy ass corporations.
Oh, idk. The entire internet and supporting infrastructure pretty much runs on opensourced software. When you’re talking about a search engine tho, unless you have a data center, a huge pile of cash, and a willingness to part with most of it, search engines are expensive to run.
We’re going to have a lot of data centres sitting idle when the AI bubble bursts.
I hope we will get there any time soon ! Discount HDD !
You man HDD’s returning back to their normal price instead of the hyperinflated price from data centers buying them in bulk. It wouldn’t be discounted it just wouldn’t be the hyperinflated price it is now. ☝🏻
They’ll get retooled just like all past, unsuccessful technology. However, I am curious why idle data centers would cause you heartburn. That cycle is not only relegated to realm of internet related technology. That happens throughout all levels.
Hear me out. From day one we all needed to collectively reject any effort to make any profit online. I don’t care if you built something cool, sold furry art or create some neat SAAS. Day one everything should have been stolen and replicated. Everyone should have been terrified of putting anything online out of fear that the monetary value would go to 0 as it was digitally recreated. We wouldn’t be in this situation today with Trump if we stood our ground. We’d have flying cars and world peace
We’d have flying cars and world peace
No we wouldn’t. World peace will never happen because there’s always something that will happen. Some (so called) leader will get killed, someone will mine for oil where they’re not supposed to, someone will bomb a religious group.
Flying cars, lol that is a crack head thing to want or ever think it will happen. People can hardly drive in the fuckin’ road!!! There’s accidents on the highway every single day, so every single day you’d see someone fall out of the sky.
From day one we all needed to collectively reject any effort to make any profit online.
WUT? Why?
We wouldn’t be in this situation today with Trump
Trump was inevitable and is a product of silly, gullible Americans blown about by political winds without a compass or direction. Americans don’t vote with the long term in mind. For the most part, their future lies within 4 year increments, never really grasping the fact that legislation passed today will be with us for generations if not longer. All you have to do is look at Cannabis laws in this country perpetuated by rich, white, racist, capitalist from 100 years ago.
We’d have flying cars and world peace
As someone who has been promised flying cars for 71 years, I don’t think I want the average motorist flying about all willy nilly. We can’t even handle the tarmac ffs…and you want flying cars? World peace? The world doesn’t want peace. There is too much to be had in conflict.
Biden had handlers, who probably were more in the Gen X - Millennial range and they were making the policies that were benefitting the younger generations.
Trump is a narcissistic individual. He’s part of the silent generation, everything he’s done is to only better the people he sees as younger than his generation which is boomers. It’s how its always worked it’s like tv and the last generation always creating media for the current one.
That’s why I say we need a Gen X in office but they’re too petty for politics, that’s why we’re stuck with the old farts in office because young people aren’t interested into getting into office.
It’s like Japan and it’s aging population, who’s gonna take over when the old people are gone?
Japan is creating robots for the population replacement due to birth rates plummeting. So who’s gonna run the US government when the old people are gone? Robots or the next generation?
Biden…the man who contributed a ton of content to the Patriot Act. The man who said: ‘If Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.’ What’s he saying? He’s saying that Israel, along with other entities world wide, serve America’s own selfish self interests. I wouldn’t be holding him up as some level of superiority.
That’s why I say we need a Gen X in office
I’ve long said we need a age cap. Get some new blood in there. They sure as shit can’t screw it up more than it is. But we’ve turned voting for the president of the United states into a World Wide Wrestling Federation event replete with all the glitz, glamor, and all the fakery you can stomach.
birth rates plummeting.
There’s a reason replacement babies are scarce, and it’s something I wrestled with as a young man back in the 60s. I looked around and thought, there’s no way I’m going to bring another life into this mess. So I opted out.
. I wouldn’t be holding him up as some level of superiority.
I said his handlers.
I’ve long said we need a age cap. Get some new blood in there. They sure as shit can’t screw it up more than it is.
Exactly. We can’t have people over the age of 70 but under the age of 40 running this country. That’s just how it should be.
There’s a reason replacement babies are scarce, and it’s something I wrestled with as a young man back in the 60s. I looked around and thought, there’s no way I’m going to bring another life into this mess. So I opted out.
Ever raise cats? They’re work!!!
Ever raise cats? They’re work!!!
It was really never the work involved in raising a child. It was what I would be raising a child in. At the time Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, the very real threat of global thermonuclear detonation, Nam, the violence and civil unrest of the 60s into the 70s and 80s, to name a few. It has done nothing but escalate.
WUT? Why?
Monetization is the root of a majority of our issues. Without monetizing you don’t get data scarcity, profile tracking, Meta, Cambridge analyticals and eventually data that feeds into the current political systems. There is a direct arrow to our current problems that goes from early days of the internet up through the monetization into data scarcity, data collection and all the marketing tools that eventually feed into modern propaganda. Safe guarding against scarcity by creating a hostile internet and culture to monetization would have prevented all of this going on currently. We can’t ever go back to that. We only ever had one chance. New frontiers do not show up every century. Our job was to keep the people who ruined everything else away.
Safe guarding against scarcity by creating a hostile internet and culture to monetization would have prevented all of this going on currently.
That die was cast long before the internet.
Duckduckgo is surprisingly okay, even with non-english queries by using the region selector (your experience may vary)
ddg is my primary right now, it absolutely sucks for korean queries sadly
Isn’t it just Bing with privacy? Or do they use their own tweeks or something? It’s what I use nowadays since google never finds anything i search for
DDG is an US based company. They will comply to all the patriot act bullshit and pipeline all your searches to the NSA…
If they really cared about privacy they wouldn’t be based in the US.
looks neat, will look into it. tysm!
yet another google “proxy” : https://www.lukol.com/
not a proxy, it directly uses google cse on client side so it’s no better than directly using google
- Yacy
- SearxNG
- Degoog!
Are about the only selfhosted ones I know of. I run SearxNG and have a good deal of success with it. It does bork image searches sometimes and tosses in these lithograph artworks, which are quite interesting to me, but don’t help in the search itself. In as much as it will draw the ire of some, AI makes a pretty good search engine if you are searching for really specific things like:
List all Blues artists that were active in 1942 in Memphis. Give resource links.just don’t “google it”.
Ahh, use an LLM instead, got it, thanks!
/s
kinda works, but their results are a bit crippled compared to google (also, no way to search specific timeframe)
?
Ah, you mean a custom timeframe. Like where you pick your own dates.
yeah, i search with ‘before 2023’ to filter AI slop often
I run SearXNG and haven’t looked back honestly, could never get on with Whoogle’s UI
This might be one of those things where self hosting isn’t worth the pain, like email.
I’ve been using Kagi for several years now and have been very happy with it.
They are literally giving part of your subscription fee to fucking Russia. In comparison, DuckDuckGo have ended their partnership with Yandex. Vlads refusal to follow suit and his steadfast support of Yandex is quite telling to say the least.
Yet another part of your subscription goes to Elon Musks xAI to support Grok in their AI assistant. Even if you are not using that model, all paying users are effectively subsidizing the cost of the Grok API calls. You can’t opt out of that.
Man, I used kagi for 2 months or so and stopped subscribing after that because while there wasn’t really anything that I’d seen that’d make me outright unsubscribe there were many things that I found odd and it didn’t make sense to pay so much for a product that I didn’t agree with all that much. For instance:
I was unable to remove yandex from my search because:
what makes it difficult to act on this is that Kagi does not save searches as a matter of privacy policy, and including more moving parts would make debugging search quality issues nearly impossible
- link here
Despite having so many AI features that barely fit into a search engine, such as a translator (slop frontend) and an entire browser?
It called itself “unprofitable” because search is so expensive while giving an honestly insane quota of AI use as far as I can understand (ex. if user pays 10$ for the kagi subscription: 10$ - 20% worth of tokens = 8$ total quota), giving 100 free searches with, as far as I could see, very little protection against burner emails (the translator seems to not need an account at all and it’s an llm frontend, so it shouldn’t be cheap), and it had many different views in many different places from me.
But all that made me do was hmmm and shrug it off. I mean, we’re different humans from different backgrounds, of course we’d hold different views.
But holy shit. Hoooooooly shit. That conversation about the GDPR in the article. What the fuck. What in the actual fuck did I just read there. The fact that the CEO emailed him an explanation despite him explicitly asking to not be emailed too. Bruh.
You should look into why so many people isn’t angry at Russia and are now blaming US. Your anger is exactly how US manufactures consent for all their wars, and it keeps you from discovering why people doesn’t hate Russia and even blame US/the west for starting it. They simply create a lynchmob - an echo-chamber - where people won’t listen to counter points bco anger. It works.
ALL US moral attacks on their ‘enemies’ (Ussr/Russia, N.Korea, China, Iran and oc ALL nations that wont be dictated how to live by the US elite) are such manufactured BS, and it all runs on the anger they create in people, and from there, they can do what they want in the name of ‘war against evil’. It will continue as long as people keep believing US and their controlled information bubble.
Give it a try, just read all the headlines in this list: What really happened in Ukraine?
If you couldn’t, or you still refuse the idea of foul play after reading - they got to you…
Tankie that use youtube conspiracy as objective truth
Also, you can hate both the USA and Russia, look, you can even hate China at the same time!! Crazy shit right?
Tankie saying everyone else is sheeple while espousing conspiracy theory YouTube playlist as objective truth.
tankie “leftists” fuck off
Thank you for your service. 50 ₽ have been deposited in your bank account. Don’t forget to fill your quota by the end of the day unless you want to volunteer for military service.
deleted by creator
You didn’t even open the link to realize it’s not an article huh
Searxng has been pretty sweet, been hosting my own for about a year and some change with pretty good results.
I do get blocked by engines occasionally which can have a drastic impact on results.
I like SearXNG,brave search and mojeek. I understand the controversies with Brave but it’s the only good one I can find.
