Poll: What is your preferred Search Engine? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What is your preferred Search Engine?

42 pointsg3eorge50 comments

You get what you pay for, one way or another. I prefer to pay in cash rather than in eyeballs, so I use Kagi. No regrets.

Yup, been using Kagi for pretty much all of my searches for like 6 months I think. No regrets so far, just better search results and less ads and tracking. The money is a pittance compared to lots of other things I do.

Just started using it, love it

too much range anxiety to pull the trigger.

Kagi Professional is $10/m and comes with unlimited searches.

...and, if you append a question mark to the end of your query, you get a one-shot LLM answer (currently powered by Claude).

Perplexity?

Phind?

https://hn.algolia.com/

github.com

arxiv.org

https://www.semanticscholar.org/

Google from 10 years ago was amazing, then they started adding "features"

Google was a directory of Stack Overflow for me, then ChatGPT but mostly Claude, and very recently DeepSeek replaced and augmented those knowledge gathering functions. Search Engines are the past.

Google is fantastic. I can't remember I time when I haven't been able to find what I'm looking for including vague concepts or song lyrics.

I have so much trouble with Google these days.

I like to ask complicated questions, where keywords are insufficient. Google first removed search predicates, making this challenging. Now their results quality is abysmal.

I'm not a fan of OpenAI because of their controversial behavior, but ChatGPT does a great job answering my questions. I can then typically search from there if I need more info.

Try Anthropic's Claude -- just as good, and free (thus far) of the sort of shenanigans one sees with "Open"AI

I have had trouble searching for blogs/sites older than a few years, in particular with image search with all the AI-generated crap that floods the internet now. The same search query in kagi gave me the results i was looking for in the first row which convinced me to do the switch. Otherwise before kagi I was going with google/startpage (uses google index). I tried DDG/bing some point but it was horrible compared to google.

Is this a comment from 2002? It's been over 20 years that everybody _knows_ Google is "fantastic".

The only new thing in the last 5 years is the absurd decline in quality of Google results.

I'm sticking with AltaVista for now. They came back against Lycos so could do it again. Anything but Yahoo! though.

I've been loving Yandex lately... it's like 2007 Google.

Kind of surprised how high up Google was in the list with the demographics we have here on HN. The majority of posts I see about search engines are pretty much exclusively bashing on Google for being garbage.

Pleasantly surprised to see how many votes there are for Kagi though as a Kagi user.

Not garbage enough, if DDG fails, I still get my stuff on Google page 1 or 2.

Being able to block domains and have a clean set of results puts Kagi ahead for me

No love for Kagi? It's the bee's knees.

I just added it.

Perplexity? Do people use that as their only search engine or just as supplemental to google or whatever?

I'm really starting to like Perplexity. I was relating an anecdote about it earlier today.

I was trying to answer an obscure question about the meaning of something in Linux's /proc filesystem. Whatever I entered into DDG or Google, I just got hits where someone had posted a copy of the file into a forum post, so it hit all the search terms, but the discussion wasn't actually about my topic.

Perplexity understood the question, and answered it... dead wrong! But its fake "citation" links led directly to several pages where people really were discussing my topic, and they answered my question.

I just added Perplexity

DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, but I do find myself using !g many a times because DDG isn’t good enough to beat Google at everything. I’ve heard good things about Kagi here, but its pricing is out of reach, considering multiple people need it in a household.

I don't prefer any of them really. I just find DDG the least aggravating. My ideal search engine would be simpler and when I tell it I'm looking for a term it would only return pages which actually include that term in the visible text.

Yep, none of the search engines are good at that. You might be able to configure your browser to automatically wrap your query behind quotes by using /search?q="%s".

Kagi has "Verbatim Mode", and a toggle in settings if you want it enabled by default.

I pay for Kagi, but while the results are generally good enough, they aren't great. I've tweaked the settings recently so I hope I see a lot less crap, especially SO scraped content.

Blocking these sites is like playing whack a mole

Formerly DDG but back to Google these days. I actually like the RAG AI summaries for general queries. Maybe having an ad blocker is helping here?

I use a mixture of Google, ChatGPT, copilot, and gemini for coding queries.

I find Gemini to be the worst of the AI tools. meta.ai for me has been the best for most things. chatgpt is also good if you aren't constrained by the last date it's been updated on the free version.

Google today is not as good as Google from 10 years ago, but:

a) a big reason for this is that the web is also not as good as it was 10 years ago, and

b) it’s still better than the alternatives, much because of (a) (but not solely)

The web is much better content-wise than it was 10 years ago. Google, the web indexer, is now trash with ads and can't bring the best of the web anymore, like it would do 10 years ago.

DDG, but pretty much exclusively for the bang shortcuts.

Kagi has all the bangs possible and imaginable, and you can configure new bangs.

But I barely use them, Kagi results by themselves are already great.

And optional LLM summary of results (either by clicking or by ending the query with a "?") is super fast and great specially when you're searching for some easy thing like "how to crop a video in ffmpeg" or "how to do a ternary in kotlin".

Nice! I use Brave because it's mostly better at finding good results but almost exclusively use bangs.

Startpage? Backend is kinda Google but still.

it uses both actually: google and bing

https://www.reddit.com/r/StartpageSearch/comments/1drkzcq/do...

I just added it.

Huh, I had no idea you could do polls like this. Neat!

Google is like capitalism. It sucks, but it's the best we got.

It's been decades, I can literally feel the cheap quality of results from anything other than Google. It's like holding that cheaper looseleaf that you can see through kind of.

This is not longer true. Try the most used search engines in the poll and you will likely find an alternative with less ad supported links and content.

I use Brave Search exclusively after migrating from DuckDuckGo a year ago or so, and I'm very satisfied. I didn't like that DDG relied on the Bing index, and the ads were starting to get a bit intrusive for me.

Brave's integrated LLM can be a bit annoying for how it reflows the page, but it can be disabled with a cookie and frankly it's been pretty helpful.

Facebook search..

Twitter search??

Wechat search!!

A lot of people use social media search.

Depends what I'm looking for.

I use Kagi, Brave, and Perplexity.

kagi for actual search, Google for products search and chatgpt for answers ;)

I begrudgingly use Google.

notepad++ also Perplexity is nice

Normtepad++?

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