I’m still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don’t trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What’s the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?

Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a “default search engine” that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.

Edit 2: Thanks for the recommendation of Kagi. I’m going to roll with it for a while. I see they have an extension for Safari that allows them to hijack the address bar, which is just what I needed.

  • jcrabappleEnglish
    41•6 months ago

    Half a dozen people in here already mentioned it, but Kagi has completely changed the search game and changed the way I use the Internet. It’s like an old school search engine with modern conveniences like a chat bot and summarizer, but without the ads and other shenanigans.

      • @douglasg14b@lemmy.world
        13•6 months ago

        It’s either your wallet or your personal information…

        A surprisingly and insanely expensive to run and manage a search engine that isn’t just a reskin on bing (DDG). Even more so when you can’t mine your users for data.

        Kagei is doing really good stuff and the quality of results I get are much higher. The $10/m is it easily paid off within even a day or two’s use in my normal job. Never mind all the personal research that I do.

        Is a different model that is a not providing you with the best results that you are looking for. As opposed to steering you towards ads or towards partnerships. I like it.

        • RBG
          10•6 months ago

          I totally get the sentiment of saying when you pay you are not the product, however… what does any company stop from still collecting data anyway? I know that the kagi people deny that but why should anyone trust that.

          Companies have fucked customers/consumers over so much, there is no trusting anyone when it comes to data collection. It is just so easy. Even if they don’t use it right now, why not just collect it anyway.

          So, while I’d love to pay a little bit to support a service like that, I am so jaded by how dishonest companies have been about stuff like that, that I am not really willing to also give them money in addition.

      • @festus@lemmy.caEnglish
        8•6 months ago

        I know, that was my reaction at first too. But I tried it for a month and honestly it’s an amazing search engine. If it helps you to know, when you search they also use the (paid) search APIs of other search engines and aggregate the results in a way to get something better than any individual engine - so your searches actually have a decent marginal cost for them.

      • jcrabappleEnglish
        2•6 months ago

        Sorry it didn’t work for you…