no mention of kagi yet? Son, I am disappoint.

The best search I found is by asking questions to real people in forums such as this one. It's way slower than getting an immediate answer for a question, but the signal to noise ratio is higher.

This is the reason why I think Google is prioritizing reddit so much in recent years, because reddit became one of the only places where you can get real people (well, relatively speaking more than most other parts of the Internet) answering all kind of questions.

Isn't Yandex Russian?

I agree with the person who identified that ChatGPT is better than a search-engine, but you have to check it, because, unlike a normal search-engine, the ai-engine, itself sometimes produces disinformaiton, instead of only linking-to disinformation.

Checking is now required in both cases.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Metasearch_engines

for some alternatives, btw.

_ /\ _

I found that no general purpose search engine will ever serve my needs. Their goal is to index the entire internet (or a very large subset of it), and sadly, a very large part of the internet is garbage I have no desire to see. So I simply stopped using search engines. I have a carefully curated, topical list of links from where I can look up information from, RSS feeds, and those pretty much cover all what I used search for.

Lately, I have been experimenting with YaCy, and fed it my list of links to index. Effectively, I now have a personal search engine. If I come across anything interesting via my RSS feeds, or via the Fediverse, I plug it into YaCy, and now its part of my search library. There's no junk, no ads, no AI, no spam, and the search result quality is stellar. The downside is, of course, that I have to self-host YaCy, and maintain a good quality index. It takes a lot of effort to start, but once there's a good index, it works great. So far, I found the effort/benefit ratio to be very much worth it.

I still have a SearxNG instance (which also searches my YaCy instance too, with higher weight than other sources) to fall back to if I need to, but I didn't need to do that in the past two months, and only two times in the past six.

None: SEO is fucking everyone, and it's not something that search engines can control. If a search engine gets popular, websites will optimize for it.

And its always the websites that optimize the most that you're least likely to actually want

I personally use https://startpage.com, although I'm definitely gonna try out some of the ones recommended on this post!

Not a serious answer but here you go

https://lieu.cblgh.org/

it’s a search engine for Webring technology

I find my self-hosted searxng pretty okay compared to others. It aggregates most of the time everything I need without the AI, bots generate crap, unecessary noise... Sometimes there are some little search bugs, but It's foss and free of charge without beeing bombarded with ads, SEO and other braindumping crap !

But Yandex sucks for actual search... Except their reverse image search which is really good, altho they nerfed it recently.

DDG, SearXNG, and occasionally Phind. DDG is my default search engine now.

I don’t know if there’s a “best” amongst these. They each do a job, but they turn up different results. “Best” is the one that lets me avoid Google or Bing. Sometimes I’m forced back to Google, but that’s getting rarer.

oooh, wiby got a .org? nice.

I don't know about self-hosted search yet, but I think that's one place where federation might actually be a feature and not overhead.

What you guys think about mojeek?

Kagi