Asklemmy @lemmy.ml superkret @feddit.org 1mo ago

Is there any good, free search engine left?

Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing now all return the same shitty LLM-generated nonsense sites to most of my searches, and don't respect my literal search terms even when I put them in quotes.

I'm not ready to pay for search, yet.

Is there any alternative?

49 comments

What are you talking about? I just tried two test queries on DDG, and neither one had LLM-generated nonsense, and the one that was in double-quotes returned only five results, all of which had the double-quoted phrase and one of which was the thing I was challenging it to find.

Can you give an example of a query where DDG returns LLM results or doesn't respect your double-quotes?
- I think they are referring to the search engines returning LLM content farm websites.
  
  Maybe I’m a little out of the loop, what are llm content farm websites?
  
  They're clearly not.
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist is supposed to remove AI slop from the results of various search engines. Wants the uBlacklist browser addon though.
- uBlacklist is an excellent add on anyway
Posted this previously:

yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:

ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.

duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.

any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.

marginalia.nu - specifically 'random' - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
- Also, Stract
  
  Thx for sharing
  
  Stract on github
  
  Can self host
  
  Are you (or is anyone here) daily-driving Stract yet? I discovered it a few months ago and thought it was everything I was looking for in a search engine, but also concluded that its search results aren't up to the standard I can use for now, so I filed it as one to look out for. Would be interested in hearing others' experiences.
- I think Searx is a good suggestion. Can be a bit slow to return results because it runs the search on a bunch of search engines and compiles the results, but that helps to make sure better stuff rises to the top.
  
  The other suggestions aren't suggestions at all. They are obsoleted by searx.space
  
  DDG ... obsolete
  
  startpage.com ... obsolete
  
  Browsers have default search engines. Curse everytime, DDG is accidentally queried.
  
  DDG is a curse word!
  
  Any centralized site, with privacy claims, is treated as lying thru their teeth. Front run future news.
  
  Just tried it and it actually worked surprisingly well
- Also 4get.ca
  
  Bump for 4get
- Microsoft invests in Ecosia
I use Qwant sometimes but it's sourced from Bing. Searx is better if you can self-host. Kagi is better if you can afford to pay (but you asked for free).
- Doesn't Kagi offer X amount of free searches per month before you pay?
  
  No. They have a trial of 100 one-time searches, but that's it.
- There's also Startpage, also pretty good. That has search results from Google and a bit of Bing though, so if that's a dealbreaker, then yeah.
Kagi if you are willing to pay for the service. I think that's reasonable but your needs may vary.
- I might pay for quality search if my searches weren’t linked back to my credit card and therefore identity.
  
  SHUM
- If it wasn't something I use every day and even for work, I wouldn't bother. But yeah, Kagi result are definitely better. Being able to rate sites high/lower in results and blocking some all together really has helped filter out the nonsense that a lot of search engines give
Brave Search is pretty nice
- I enjoy using Brave Search. But it sucks for images for some reason. I use DDG for images.
- Yeah, agree. I don’t see many LLM results but I can’t say I never see any.
Not sure if its untrustworthly or not, but switched over to Startpage and been liking the results. Just wished it would implement the !bang system from ddg

www.startpage.com
- They use Googles results with a bit of Bing mixed in. Bangs should work too, like !wiki for Wikipedia or !d for DeepL They're partly owned by an adtech company though (and say they dont share anything).
I use whoogle
- This
Startpage.com works well enough
startpage
- Startpage uses Google.
udm14.org is about as close as you can get
Reply to this for me to see tomorrow please
- ok
  
  Thanks. Got a lot of downvotes lol
I've been using brave search on my pc and phone for maybe 6 months now. i still use google like 10% of the time if i'm searching for something that isn't in english, but otherwise, id even say for many things brave returns better results than google
shitty LLM-generated nonsense sites

It's kind of impossible to filter these out computationally, regardless of brand. You pretty much need to run them through a bigger LLM than generated them, and the economics of doing that for every indexed site are obviously bad. Doing it by hand may or may not be workable either, depending on how quickly you can detect bad domains versus how quickly a new domain can be put up.

It's on us to figure out who's trustworthy, and who just sounds authoritative, unfortunately.

49 comments