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Comment by MrGilbert | Hacker News Reader

Any alternative to Google?

Bing is pretty much the next best engine, but also has targeted ads (albiet less intrusive) and IMO less relevant results without fine tuning. DuckDuckGo uses Bing's backend without targeted ads (but still uses ads). Kagi uses google backend but without Google's ad-optimized algorithms. But that's a subscription solution.

sadly your best "free" alteratives is going back to the days of smaller, specific communities, and searching through there. If the forum has a bad search, you go back to google but can then use Site:[website.com] as a filter to fine tune your results. .

Yes, lots of them, but they are all just a matter of not giving all your search data to same company, non I know work better in this regard, in finding good forum posts or logs to answer questions you have.

weirdly enough, when asking for documentation/problem solving types of questions - chatGPT actually is a good alternative. you still have to double-check since you can't trust it... but you shouldn't trust random google results either, so that's not a big change.

it's kinda weird how the web has increasingly become optimized for bots - and filled with content created by bots... to the point where as a human you now need a bot to cut through all the bloated SEO bullshit and filter out what you actually want to know...

Kagi (I'm a customer) works much the same way google did in 2010 or so.

As a customer of Kagi, it's better than the current Google but it's still not the Google of 2010. Google sponsoring irrelevant results is one thing, but the bigger issue remains: in 2024, creating a trove of worthless "articles" and optimizing the crap out of search result performance is a viable business model. Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance. No doubt the same is true for all alternative search engines.

> Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance

It seems to be responsive to which sites you want ranked higher/lower. For instance I have wikipedia pinned which resolves a longstanding issue google has had where seo is prioritized over relevancy.

I looked up Kagi and their sources include "AI" - do you know if one can turn this off?

Yes there’s a toggle to turn it off in settings. It’s a little AI summary box they sometimes show at the top of search results.

Yeah, I keep that off - although the one time I looked at it, the text it generated was full of footnote citations, which linked to actual search results which supported what it was saying.

I still don't use it - I can't trust it not to misrepresent what its citations say, and if I have to check the cited pages I might as well just use regular search.

Yea trivially

Kagi is solid

Bing is ok for results, but tries to push too much crap on you - do you want to link to your microsoft account? We've got rewards for you, are you sure you don't want to link to your microsoft account? Have you tried our copilot AI? Do you want to switch to Edge as your default browser? Did you know you can link Edge to your microsoft account? Here's some news from a scummy right-wing tabloid paper on the home page that you might be interested in.

I think in the default windows setup, your bing searches are "integrated" with your user account in some way.

Look, I don't mind the top 2 search results being ads (if you make them visually distinct from the rest), but I don't want all the other crap.

Bing's engine through duckduckgo is better. The ads don't get in your way once you've learned to start reading at the third entry on the page.

Claude Sonnet 3.5

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