Ask HN: Best search engine alternatives to Google? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best search engine alternatives to Google?

56 pointscowpig47 comments

I find Google amazing for some kinds of queries, such as directly answering simple factual questions or finding content within a defined domain.

However, for a lot of things it's quite bad. If I want to find a good website for some use-case (as opposed to directly finding information inside a page), or if I want anything where there might be a commercial interest in ~~lying~~ advertising to me, Google is truly awful.

It's also, obviously, very bad for privacy.

Surely there are a bunch of interesting new search engines popping up given the recent deep learning explosion? What interesting alternatives have you discovered?

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I switched over to https://kagi.com a while ago and never use Google search anymore.

Didn't they have some controversy recently where they screwed over their initial users?

I didn't care much about that, seemed reasonable what they did.

Yes the changed pricing but then grandfathered people in later so didn't end up screwing people over.

I’m an initial user, and I don’t feel screwed over fwiw.

I always knew that the site was going to come with a cost, and that’s why I’m using kagi; I would rather that cost be money than invasive advertising ruining my search results.

I feel like they have been very transparent about pricing and their justifications.

Kagi is great. I've had to find some obscure things recently and it was fantastic. No ads, no irrelevant garbage designed to make money for the search engine. Instead my interests and that of kagi are aligned - find the best search result - and it is great.

For years I would at times try different search engines when fed up with Google. Such as Duck Duck Go, Bing and others. They were always much worse than Google.

Kagi's search results are much better than anything else you can find right now. It was easy to just forget about Google.

Odd, I'm paying for Kagi but still find Google better

Yandex is pretty useful as a last resort for things banned elsewhere

also: https://search.marginalia.nu/

I really liked marginalia when I first used it (when it was released) but it seems to have a little more cruft now. Not sure if that's other peoples experience too?

Yandex is useful for reverse image searching.

Been using Brave Search since it was public, it's improved a lot since. I also really like Duckduckgo and I use it on mobile, but Brave Search indexes their own sites rather than being a meta search engine, like how ddg uses Bing results. Nothing wrong with meta search engines though, I just personally prefer the way Brave does it.

I like DuckDuckGo but it seems so slow lately , maybe it’s my location but it’s punishing.

I've been paying for kagi for a while now and am pretty happy with it. Switched from DuckDuckGo.

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine however I do find myself adding the "!g" bang a lot. It's hard to escape the google grasp.

Kagi is pretty good, but as someone living in a 3rd world country, it is too expensive. They say 300 queries/month is enough for almost everyone, but I've almost reached that amount in just a few days. And few cents per query adds up when I do multiple searches per topic, times ten for currency weakness.

AI search engines like perplexity.ai are too slow, and I end up clicking the referenced links anyway.

Once my Kagi credits are used up, I'll go back to DDG, which has better results than google in my experience. Though reddit being gone makes it hard to tell rn.

Give mojeek a try. It is keyword based, not query based ( they explain on their home page) and it works very nicely and there is no cost.

There are plenty of search engines that don't spy on you, here's a few... https://duckduckgo.com/ https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.startpage.com/

I can only speak to DDG but the quality of results are worse than Google. I still use it anyway as privacy outweighs accuracy for most of my searches.

interesting, I find results to much better than Google. I haven't used Google in about 2 years now, and I find myself appalled when I borrow someone's laptop to do a search online

> There are plenty of search engines that don't spy on you

That's a very bold (and erroneous) statement when you put DDG in the list

I use DuckDuckGo, and contrary to other comments here I find the results far better than Google on the very rare occasions I have to use it

I've tried using DDG multiple times in the past and I've always disliked the results. But recently I gave it another go and I use it as my main driver now. I'd love for it to have a bit more tooling cause stuff like calculator or currency exchange is quirky and won't always show up but I'm really happy about the results, especially at work. Haven't had a need for Google in few months. It even finally correctly showing results local to me, relevant new political news etc. I noticed a big difference between now and last time I tried it(year or two ago).

I like Whoogle (https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search), e.g., https://s.tokhmi.xyz/, and Searx (https://github.com/searx/searx), e.g., https://searx.space/

I've also programmed https://metaforecast.org, which aggregates over prediction platforms (Polymarket, Metaculus, Manifold Markets, etc.)

Have you looked at Startpage?

https://www.startpage.com

If the complaint is about Google's results, Startpage isn't going to help much.

I think this is kind of an interesting project, though I suspect it's as bad or worse than google for privacy:

www.perplexity.ai

Kagi's great, when it did not get good result, neither did google.

Only that you have to keep a mental counter on the usage.

You don't need to do that. A search only costs a couple of cents after using all your supply.

I was using Kagi, and while I paid for them for a good while, I switched to DDG because I just can’t afford to subscribe to so many things. It’s money well spent and I agree with and support their philosophy, but man, all these monthly things add up.

Kagi user here, very happy with them so far. I honestly use maybe a third of their features (lens and boost/block are great ones that I'm too lazy/forgetful to use).

They also recently announced search AI (I think powered by Anthropic over their index) and API, which, as a developer, I also find useful.

Finally, the vision and priorities they communicate are something I agree with.

All this makes it a nobrainer to pay for their service.

I am surprised no one has mentioned Ecosia yet.

I am a not a developer, so my use case is different but Ecosia.org returns good results almost all the time. Of not, I would use StartPage.

Yes, Yacy https://yacy.net - P2P search

https://www.searchenginemap.com/

Yandex is the least censored. IMHO, it works like Google did in the 2000s. Yeah Russia bad, blah blah.

I was using yandex fr the lack of censorship but have found some health and holistic things are no longer coming up since very recently. I've started using mojeek as an alternative since I am studying as an herbalist and need to get sites other than healthline and webmd.

Thanks for the tip. I usually search for "ivermectin" to see how biased a search engine is and mojeek did pretty well.

IMO brave is the best alternative search engine but it definitely show its limit with niche queries.

SearxNG. Happy user of an instance someone is hosting near me that is fast and reliable.

100%. Private, no tracking, can index all the major search engines. You can even host your own relatively easily. This is the way.

I've been increasingly using Ecosia for a while. They use Bing under the hood.

Brave, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Mojeek (UK), Qwant (France)

Is there a reliable offline alternative to search?

you.com, drops you directly into a LLM response to your question, with search results on the right side.

webcrawler.com

Going on four years now. Reminds me of how Google used to be, 15 years ago.

wow, just tried this, been researching herbalism, holistic medicine and homestead style farming and this engine is to the point! This stuff has been systematically disapearing from other searches. Thank you

Perplexity AI

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