Ask HN: What is your replacement for Google search | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your replacement for Google search

78 pointsMeph504103 comments

Searching for meaningful results is becoming more and more difficult with google. I am wondering what those of you who have replaced it, what did you replace it with, and how happy are you with it?

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I pay for Kagi.com

I switched from ddg which I did ASAP whenever that was. People seem to forget that Google's heyday at search was during a period where they proudly had no business model beyond better search. The response to what is the business model question I believe was "do no evil".

I use Kagi as well: interestingly, they nailed the localised searches in multi-script languages like Serbian too (which all other alternatives to Google don't do). It definitely matches or surpasses quality of results Google would give you. TBH though, they do have the benefit of not being targeted by SEO fraudsters (just like Linux desktop is mostly virus free because it's not relevant enough for virus authors).

Once you look up who's behind Kagi, language support is no surprise though.

Edit: the only thing I dislike is that logo with "g" dominating and reminding you of Google.

Also using Kagi - I like the customization how you can boost certain sites results and block or derank others on an individual level.

It does take a little getting used to vs Google, but I'd say 95% of my searches are on Kagi now. Occasionally if I can't find something, I'll use Google as backup, but for most things, Kagi is good enough.

I also pay for Kagi and have never looked back--consistently good results. And I also pay for protonmail so as not to use Google.

is it objectively better than google?

Yes, I did the same result in one or the other for all my searches before I committed to paying and it was always as good or better than Google. (I even gifted a year's subscription to my friend.)

In terms of "basic" search results, yes, at least marginally. I don't find them to be revolutionary but it comes with many improvements, manual control over upranking and downranking domains, it respects logical query filters such as "AND", "OR", +, -, and quotation marks. It reduces clutter of "Top X products in category" type results by grouping them in their own section of the page.

For the downsides, it requires linking a payment card so it's impossible for them to guarantee privacy (cryptocurrencies could save the day here) and it completely relies on other search engines like Google and Bing for search results which is a questionable long-term strategy in my eyes.

> completely relies on other search engines like Google and Bing for search results

Got a quote on that? I was pretty convinced they (Kagi) did their own indexing, and results are significantly different from both Google/Bing.

Sure, they're completely transparent about it. You can find the proportion of external search results right under the filters, with further information in their FAQ. They integrate their own indexers but I believe bulk of the results come from Google, Bing & others (hence the relatively high per-query cost).

https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from

I meant that they were "completely reliant" on these APIs in terms of utility, not that 100% of search results are external. I'd love to be proven wrong on this but my impression is that without Google, Bing, and other APIs Kagi wouldn't be a functional and competitive product.

Thanks! Hopefully with all the (monetary and word of mouth) support they are getting, they can move in the direction of becoming completely independent.

I switched to Kagi recently as an experiment after hearing someone suggest it here and I really dig it a lot actually. I was on DDG previously but the results for most of my software dev queries would always go to the most outrageous/terrible content farms or stack overflow mirror sites. Kagi is a breath of fresh air. Only frustration is that it's harder to integrate into the browser (ie, on Mac/Safari it requires a standalone application installation) but the trade-off is well worth it so far.

I also pay for Kagi. Similar to others here, I had switched from Google to DDG, but found myself going !g about 50% of the searches. With Kagi, I almost never use the !g bang.

Same here none of the other engines I tried stuck because I always had to go back to Google.

I still use Google for Google images

I've used DDG consistently for a year.

In the beginning I went to Google quite often, but now I'm down to <5%.

Now I use Google only if I want to buy things, or do image search. I look forward to trying Kagi.

I had a question that was difficult to search for about a framework recently. While Kagi didn’t fully get me to the solution in the end either (a human query did), the difference in results was interesting:

Google retrieved content spam and mailing list entries about previous versions of that framework that have been outdated for years. There was no code in the first page of results.

Kagi found commented scripts in a GitHub project interfacing with the framework, which basically did what I wanted to do.

While I understand that SEO is a problem that Kagi does not have yet, I don’t understand that Google doesn’t allow me to simply blacklist Pinterest, Quora and annoying content spam and StackOverflow mirrors. Also I never want my queries to be interpreted for me, by ignoring search words or using synonyms so that my exact query is always a few more clicks away. If you want to appeal to the lowest common human denominator then techies are probably not in that target group anymore. Are Googlers still using Google?

Kagi also seems to be ahead of their time in thinking about search. In a blog post they were talking about personalized AI very early and I only really understood what they meant after encountering ChatGPT.

When will Kagi be bought by Apple?

Same here.

I split tested Kagi for every result for a few days. I used an Alfred workflow to open results in both engines at once.

Then I switched to Kagi full time and never looked back. Been using it for a few months now and I’m still super impressed.

Sometimes I have my doubts about the results and open google. In the majority of cases the results are not better.

I haven't used Google for search for years personally and professionally. I first switched to DDG and at first found I would fall back to Google, but as I learnt the tool and time went on I slowly stopped falling back to Google search. I now pay for Kagi and love it and would say it has now been at least 18 months since I used Google search with intention on my devices. However, there are times when I have to use a device or system that is not mine and I need to use search, Google is default, and I use it to get the job done. I no longer enjoy the experience, I don't miss using it, there are a lot of ads, and the results are definitely no better and harder to pick it out.

I'm really confused as to why people still state Google as the standard to beat. IMO, that's no longer true.

DuckDuckGo has been my daily driver for several years. I use bangs ({search query} !g/!yt/!reddit) to quickly get to Google/Youtube/reddit etc results. Thus far, I have not noticed any significant change in my search experience.

I pay for https://kagi.com - it's absolutely perfect.

Edit: I should explain why - a) you search for something, you find that thing. This should be table stakes for a search engine, but it's just not true of any of the others any more. b) No ads, no tracking. c) The lenses are excellent, mine defaults to the programming one a lot and the results are consistently great. d) You can up/down rank or block specific sites! Bye bye w3schools and pinterest! e) Did I mention that if you search for something you actually find it?

All of this ^^^

There are release notes! With RSS! https://kagi.com/changelog

Experiments (remember Google Labs‽) - https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum

Oooh, didn't know about the release notes RSS, thanks!

I use and pay for Kagi, but more as an effort to support what I want to see (alternatives to Google) than specifically being 100% in love with it. It's pretty good, though, and definitely provides a bit of an alternative lens on the web from Google. I use !g much less frequently with Kagi than I used to with DDG.

I hadn't encountered Kagi's summarizer yet - thanks for the pointer.

Their "context search" was interesting given the hype around ChatGPT, and I'm excited to see where that goes. I see that's moved out of "labs" and will be added this month: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/contextai

A bit of self-reflection:

https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://news.ycombinator.co...

Many people have replaced Google search with other search engines such as DDG, Kagi, Brave, Neeva, and SearX. These search engines offer features such as manual control over upranking and downranking domains, the ability to lock search results to a specific region, and the ability to exclude or include certain sites in the results. Additionally, some search engines such as Kagi and Neeva offer the ability to pay for a subscription to access additional features. One interesting feature is the ability to use keywords in autosuggestions automatically, which can be found in Neeva.

I use Brave search. It's free, and IMO the quality of search results is actually _better_ than Google's. I occasionally add the `g!` shebang to get google results for a query when Brave results aren't great, and the Google ones are often even less relevant.

For some reason I don't really see other people talk about it on HN, but I absolutely love it. You don't need to use a specific browser (I use firefox on desktop and iOS) or use any other Brave products/features, it's completely standalone.

Iuse brave search too. Is it better than google? Maybe. Is itbetter than duck duck go? Absolutely.

I waffle back and forth between you.com and brave. I also have the keywords: g! for google (url bar), gh for github search ordered by most stars, with > 5 stars, and that have been pushed to within the past year, or since 1/1/2022, anyways.

I also have r! which is google but add site:reddit.com to the end.

I am curious how often others actually use a general search engine and what their searches are. I probably only search (using duck duck go) two or three times a week. This week it was for:

1. A very specific error message nodejs was giving me on one platform about ssl. I usually end up doing site:stackoverflow.com

2. A firmware upgrade for an NVR system (hunting through the manufacturer's website was futile, so I did a search site site:manufacturer.com)

And in both of these cases, while I was using ddg, I was only using it as an index into a specific site, rather than searching the internet.

Other things that I search for, I tend to go to a more direct search engine. If I want to know about a thing/person/event, I just search wikipedia. If I am looking up a band, I just search metal-archives or bandcamp. For movies/cast, straight to imdb. For computer products, straight to newegg. For news, I go straight to my preferred new sources. For Elixir questions, straight to elixir forums. Restaurants, straight to maps.

So, what is it everyone is actually using Google (or other general search engines) for?

If I search for something that I know I'll likely find on a "specialized" site, like your IMDB, etc examples, I'll go there. Most Linux-related stuff, I'll first try my luck on the Arch wiki.

But for general searches, I'll hit google.

A few months ago I was looking to buy a NVMe drive, so I hit google looking for product reviews, etc. I don't do this often enough, so even though I know some of the usual review sites by name, I don't usually think of going there right away.

I'm looking to set something up on windows at work. I'm not a windows guy, and it's not something very common, so my colleagues can't help. Windows docs are questionable on this subject. Hit google up looking for this and found some random blogs.

For tech searches, I often end up on either some stack exchange site or that product's forum. But not always, and I don't tend to look there in priority. I sometimes get reddit results, but I absolutely loathe the experience, so I try to avoid going there as much as possible.

To your point, I don't do it all day every day, but it's pretty much my go-to way of looking "new" stuff up.

If you’ve used IMDb, you may enjoy tmdb.org . It is much, much faster, and has good coverage. I rarely need to fall back to IMDb unless it’s something quite obscure.

As a developer, I agree. When coding, I look for three things:

- well-written blog articles

A single article, describing a real dev solving a real business challenge with real code, is the best way to answer technical questions. They provide a lot of context, and reasoning, and have real-world advice which is invaluable to me.

I use Google for this, but it requires care. A lot of sites are poorly written, or copied from other sites, or are gibberish. With experience you can quickly tell if a blog post is going to be of high enough quality or not.

- short answers, or reference documentation

Google/StackOverflow is okay to answer the question "I have tech X and want Y using library Z". Just recently I've switched to asking GitHub Copilot for answers to small questions. It's not perfect but incredibly valuable. The big downside is since Copilot sends code to a server, it's not okay when working with client code. Copilot is great for learning, though.

For reference docs I use Google to find manpage sites, then I setup custom searches for them. Example: https://man.cx/ for Linux docs, and https://ss64.com/osx/ for macOS.

There's also https://devdocs.io/ which is incredibly fast but too webdev-centric compared to my normal work.

- example code

This site is magic! Incredibly useful source code search engine: https://grep.app/

Example: Kubernetes manifests can be complex and mysterious. The following produces 250,000(!) Kubernetes YAML manifests for study. Enjoy!

https://grep.app/search?q=apiVersion%3A&words=true&filter[la...

Brave's search is actually pretty good. It has been my daily driver for a month or so. It seems to prioritize forums and what-not.

It also supports !g , so if a search doesn't return expected results I just head to google.

+1 for brave search.

It’s still got room for improvement, but I’ve personally found to to be a marked improvement over ddg.

I was very happy with Brave search until they broke the !i image search bang. I used that all the time.

Hi, Brave engineer here,

Thanks for your feedback, we've fixed the !i image search bang.

Another +1... Of all the non-google solutions I've tried Brave's has come the closest for my programming and non-programming searches alike. For the most part the only time I'm going to google is for specific things like local searches. And I'm using it via MS Edge, so don't need Brave.

The only times I find myself returning to google is when I am actually looking to buy something. Brave lacks at market search.

oh, this is a +1 for Brave

I pay for Neeva: https://neeva.com/

I started using it as a Beta product, and then continued with a paid subscription.

You can bump search sources up/down so filter out website you don't care about or emphasize those you do like.

They just launched a ChatGPT (Neeva AI) search result integration, which is as good as can be expected - it includes citations, which is nice.

Ok. Be interested to see how this compares to Kagi

I pay for Kagi, results are good and the ability to raise/lower the ranking of results for future queries is really interesting.

Over the last few weeks searching for images I found Bing to be alot better and remind of the old days of Google.

I found more value in its results than Google. And I don't even like Microsoft.

It appears like Bing is currently restricting content similarly to Google. Nowadays, Yandex is the only search engine that actually finds results i'm looking for.

Thanks. I'll look at Yandex!

Founder at https://Lexii.ai here—we’re a GPT-3 based search engine that pulls in real-time legacy search results and cites sources. Would love feedback, we’re just in alpha but we’ve already got ~50,000 searches per month.

wow, super cool!

I've made some simple tests, and it works perfectly! congratulation!

This is really well done! Kudos! I could definitely see using something like this. The only weirdness I found was when asking about code, it does not format example code in the response.

I default to DDG (have for years) but the results are typically so completely useless that I switch to Google most of the time.

Google results are usually only slightly better than DDG, and this is aggressively worsened by Google's extremely user-hostile experience (for this particular user), but sometimes that's sufficient to get me where I'm trying to go.

Rapidly reaching a point where I'm best off searching Reddit and hoping what I want was mentioned there at some point and turns up in a result, but they also have a user-hostile (for me) experience, subpar search, and an ever-increasing amount of plain gibberish noise to sift through.

I'm basically at the "The web was better before Altavista" point.

I used to have to switch to Google a lot, but over the past couple years I find myself doing it less and less. And recently, a few times I've switched to Google I've received worse results.

SearX - in my case SearXNG [1] - running on the server-under-the-stairs, pointed at a host of different search engines (including Google). It'll give you results returned by all of those engines, it makes clear which subjects are being censored by which search engine and it makes sure your search history does not end up feeding the data-hungry beasts of Google, Apple, Microsoft and all the others.

[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

Also https://crowdview.ai/ for 100% organic, forum search.

I don't use kagi.com because I don't like idea of linking my credit card to search queries.

May I ask why you are hesitant to link your credit card to search queries? No judgement, just curious.

> May I ask why you are hesitant to link your credit card to search queries? No judgement, just curious.

You're fully capable of answering that question on your own.

Thanks for the insightful response. /s

To clarify why I’m asking, it seems that linking your credit card to a search engine is no different than linking it to your Netflix or using it for any purpose online. Could your history be linked to you? Sure, but no more so than when using free search alternatives which build ad profiles on you then actively sell that history to anyone willing to pay. Maybe DDG and Brave refrain from this practice, but that just leaves them still searching for a reliable income stream.

I personally pay for Kagi and have been very happy with it. The search results are great and the customization features are a great selling point. So, as someone who pays for search, I was asking for insight on why someone would be hesitant doing just that over and against paying for any other online service. I may be missing something. I probably am, but that’s why I posed the question.

Privacy.

I have no real replacement but bounce between DuckDuckgo and Google.

But this search tool intrigues

https://search.marginalia.nu/

I'm sort of intentionally trying to not build a Google clone, but something else. Emulating the big G feels like a bit of a dead end. Rarely does a copy exceed what it is copying.

Right now I am okay with DDG. The amount of times I have resorted to tacking on the !g has only been decreasing, and lately I have found that if DDG can't find it neither can google. I also like being able to do the bangs directly in my url bar, it's a good poweruser utility.

I also use one extra thing, an extension called 'highlight or hide search engine results'[1]. I have first party documentation highlighted in blue, good community sites in green, lower quality sites greyed out, and content farms hidden completely. I've also been storing page highlights in raindrop.io[2]

Between the two of these I spend less overall time actually reviewing the search results and it is easier for me to return to good results that I found in the past.

[1] https://github.com/pistom/hohser

[2] https://raindrop.io/

Still waiting for a search engine that only searches Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Flickr, and a handful of other sites.

More or less what CrowdView does.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507965

- https://crowdview.ai/

I can vouch for crowdview as well. Discovered it a few weeks ago and it does a great job at cutting through the typical search bullshit when you want human responses

Set up a custom Lens in Kagi.

Here's the form to do exactly that:

Create a Lens

Name of the lens

Describe what the lens does, up to 300 characters. (optional)

The style of how results will be rendered

Lock your search results to a specific region

Choose Region

Include only these sites in results (up to 10, comma-separated)

Exclude these sites in results (up to 10, comma-separated)

Include pages containing these keywords (up to 5, comma-separated)

Use keywords in autosuggestions automatically

Automatically use your supplied 'Included Keywords' in autosuggest when the lens is enabled.

Exclude pages containing these keywords (up to 5, comma-separated)

File type

Include results before this date

Include results after this date

Yesterday

Show results from Yesterday to Today (UTC)

When checked, before and after times will do nothing.

That sounds incredibly useful!

Data is available for at least the first three of those (reddit isn't "officially" available but there are 3rd party dumps).

Why not load it into OpenSearch or some such?

It's a bit wordy, but adding `(site:flickr.com OR site:wikipedia.org OR site:reddit.com)` to the end of your query will still restricted to those three sites.

Mojeek Focus does this, up to 25 sites (optionally incl subdomains) and 25 exclusions. No signin/signup required.

https://blog.mojeek.com/2022/08/mojeek-focus-search-the-web-...

As most of the search alternatives rely on G/Bing in one form or another, there's not many in the position to offer this kind of customisation using an independent index. Disclaimer, I am an employee at Mojeek.

I believe that you may do this by only enabling those sites you mentioned as a Search Engine in SearX(NG), not sure of SOf or Flickr though..

On both Google and Duckduckgo, I have come to loathe the mass of nonsense pseudo-blogposts on dev topics from some contentfarms that have started to poison all search results a couple of years ago. I wish there was a search engine that eliminates all that crap. I can block individual sites, but it doesn't help.

I don't know what queries y'all are doing, but I can't think of the last time I wasn't able to find what I was looking for through Google. About the only time that happens is when Google has indexed a page, but the page has since been removed (and didn't allow caching, grrr).

Used DDG on and off (mostly off) for years. Always ended up doing !g and getting better results. Google results got trashy even with Firefox extension that blacklisted garbage sites. Paid for kagi since December and it's great. No regrets, will keep paying.

https://searx.ebnar.xyz/

One of the many SearXNG available, see https://searx.space

I used https://searx.be/ which is also part of this network.

I switched from DDG when I learned that DDG censored search results during the initial invasion of Ukraine.

But their latency was too high compared to DDG, so eventually I went back.

I use Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org/. The quality of the results is similar, if not better than those of Google Search. Also, DDG as a second resort.

Regarding Google search results, could some explain to me what it is that appears after the first few sections of results and the format changes to something else entirely? When I run the search on my iPhone for “baseball”, I get a few screens worth of normal looking stuff and then if I keep scrolling past the “More search results” link the background turns pinkish and scrolling gets jerky. Nothing of real value ever shows up at this point and the user experience is absolutely terrible. Are these paid placements? Does this section of results have a proper name?

DuckDuckGo, if they can't find it my experience is that neither can Google.

I do make frequent use of !wen to get a Wikipedia article, if I already know that's what I want.

95% happy with DuckDuckGo. For the rest, I resort to Google.

I've been using Brave search. DDG if brave can't find it, and startpage if I really just want Google results.

Google used to be so good that other engines were noticeably less usable. As Google keeps getting worse and worse, the alternatives get relatively better. Even if brave and DDG aren't on the same level as Google ten years ago, they're miles better than Google today.

Duckduckgo has been great for me

Same here. It’s not perfect but most of the time I know roughly what I want to find and visit websites directly anyway. Sometimes I use !g to use on Google instead if I think that Google will provide better results.

Haven't used Google search in my personal life for years. I currently use a mixture of metager.org and qwant.com. You get used to it really quickly and also build up a knowledge base of bookmarks. On my path to remove big tech from my life Google was the easiest to drop (Bar YouTube which I now only use exclusively with frontends, RSS, and yt-dlp).

Duck Duck Go, but I’m building my own. Not in a “my startup will compete with Google” way, but in a self-hosted way.

YaCy is a really cool open source search engine and web indexer, and features p2p index sharing. Im hosting my own crawler, and feeding my browser history in, so it’ll index my history, and make finding things I’ve already seen (eg documentation) easy.

Is there any true search engine available? By which I mean one where I can actually write queries, narrow those queries, filter results based on containing or not containing a pattern, and so on.

All of what are sold as search engines today that are known to me are just chatbots of varying quality. As far as I know the last search engine was Altavista.

Apparently Bing will release new search functionality which boosted with GPT4 perhaps that will be replacement.

Duckduckgo, Startpage and Bing

DDG results are usually good on their own now.

With bangs I can use !s for anonymized Google results, !g for Google, !yt for Youtube.

I use Bing at work for Edge browser due to the Office 365 search and also get rid of the nag screens... But I REALLY like the layout of Bing.

DDG, with the very rare !g to search Google. DDG has been doing a great job for my needs.

I've been using DDG for years now, and find it superior to Google 90% of the time.

startpage.com and ddg. Both work great. Takes a bit of getting used to, since it's less personalised, but I've not missed it since.

Using it for years already

Duck duck go works fine for me since 2019 or so. Sometimes google is better but its rare now.

Bing image search has gotten me results that Google could not.

A browser search shortcut for:

site:reddit.com OR site:news.ycombinator.com %s

I alternate between Ask Jeeves and Bing for maximum privacy

https://neeva.com/

It's not free but they aren't in the business of building marketing profiles, only for improving the science of search.

> they aren't in the business of building marketing profiles

I am a paying subscriber to neeva since the start.

This is the about page:

Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube). They met in the early days of search ads at Google, and came up with the idea for Neeva over hikes and coffee.

Both of those jobs are about marketing profiles. The "visionary investors" include the master of all business profiles:

Reid Hoffman - Greylock partner. Investor, entrepreneur, strategist. Co-Founder of Linkedin and founding team PayPal. Investor: Airbnb, Facebook, Zynga. BS Stanford, MA Oxford.

Initially, it seemed evident they were optimizing search for products. It seemed evident the business model was to empower consumers to find products and trust the search that helped them do that.

Now it's not clear to me what they're up to, and I can't tell what the business model is. I'm not really buying the privacy marketing angle, like, at all.

Still the best general engine for product search though I rarely use it over Kagi which I also pay for.

I had not heard of Kagi but I will check it out.

yup, neeva is sus. they invested a lot of dough into a useless NFT search. right before NFTs collapsed. Regardless of the collapse it was a dumb idea. and it tells me a lot about the company. (not just the web3 angle -- agnostic about that actually.)

there is no way you rage quit against ads, as an SVP ads at Google, and also bring a VP of monetization with you.

it's not that they are evil in disguise. i very much doubt that. but there is also no way they "fight for the user". When your mission statement is a lie ("Our mission is to serve our users, and only our users."), you have a problem.

Google and ChatGPT but not in that order.

ChatGPT

you.com

andisearch.com you.com neeva.ai duckduckgo ChatGPT (use with caution)

ChatGPT for some queries

you.com neeva.ai andisearch.com duckduckgo chatGPT

andisearch.com neeva.ai you.com duckduckgo ChatGPT

ChatGPT. Simple.

Andi Search!

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