It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.

Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.

If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?

EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.

  • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
    1·
    8 months ago

    Technically the best one was Altavista.

    But they are long gone because they came from the old academic & idealistic internet and they never learned to survive in that internet where money rules.

    • cll7793@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      Altavista was ahead of their time. The modern internet desperately needs a technical search engine.

    • Deceptichum@kbin.social
      1·
      8 months ago

      From a very old memory, Google blew AltaVista out of the water no?

      I mean we all switched for a reason and it wasn’t the cute logo.

  • kd45@lemm.ee
    1·
    8 months ago

    Many people keep asserting that DuckDuckGo is as useless as Google, but I haven’t had a single issue with it. Could it be a regional thing?

    • Scrollone@feddit.it
      1·
      8 months ago

      I don’t live in the US and the regional results for my country are worse on DuckDuckGo than on Google.

      But still, I noticed Google’s quality drastically falling down in recent years.

    • Dave@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 months ago

      DDG is ok for most searches, but they have definitely hit a plateau. Programming search results are quite poor, for instance.

      I’ve started paying for kagi. Their results are just way better at this point.

  • 0oWow@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Brave Search works really well for me, and they have AI responses at the top of the page now that are really good.

    • DolphinMath@slrpnk.netEnglish
      01·
      8 months ago

      Not sure why you got downvoted like crazy, but Brave legitimately has a great search engine. It also uses its own crawlers unlike DDG, Startpage or Kagi who are really just meta search engines piggybacking off other companies’ results.

  • DolphinMath@slrpnk.netEnglish
    01·
    8 months ago

    Here are some options I use in my rotation.

    Brave Search (skip the browser)

    Mojeek

    Qwant (French)

    Yandex (Russian)

    Mullvad Leta (Mullvad VPN subscription required)

    MetaGer (German meta search)

    Startpage (Private Google results)

    DuckDuckGo (Private Bing results)

    SearXNG and similar self hosted options are awesome, but I’ve found them unreliable.

    Be skeptical of Kagi… It’s promoted pretty heavily around here for something that’s not FOSS.