I know it’s been getting worse over time, but I could still find what I needed after some digging.
Recently it’s been like 10 minutes of adjusting search terms, still getting completely useless or irrelevant results, and me just giving up afterwards. Other search engines seem just as bad.
The results are usually the most clicked, not necessarily the factual links. Others have recommended kagi. I haven’t tried it yet. I remember when the internet started and you had to use them all!
I’ll have to try kagi some time
EDIT: subscription based… Idk, definite maybe on that one.
Is that the one that costs money? You can’t have a true incognito search if that’s the case.
True, but worth reading their about page and privacy page. Not saying it’ll stay this way, but the way they are running is something that makes more sense then being sold as a product to Google. And you aren’t getting much of an incognito these days with all the fingerprinting they are doing.
I will admit kagi search isn’t the highest performer, but it’s viable. DDG, Start page, etc. Might give you more privacy, or not (hard to tell with DDG these days), but it might be worth trying a different model for a while.
I miss the days when the internet was truly free, but in lieu of that we have to have something better. Kagi is a start.
You can’t have? Or you can’t be sure?
Because you certainly can have. Just because you pay, doesn’t mean they will log your searches. In fact Kagi claim they don’t. And since their only income comes from paying users. If anyone ever found out they’re lying about that, they’d quickly loose a big chink of subscribers and income. As well as get sued for fraud. So it’s rather unlikely they do.
Unlike every other search provider, Kagi is the only one with a business model that ensures it’s users are the customer, not the product. When actually using it every day, that’s quite obvious in the results. Even when you search for a company directly, it’s Wikipedia entry is usually the first result. The the company site is the second.
True Incognito mode is a myth, it only stops keeping a history in the tab of that browser. Everytime you use a browser to go to any site ever, the browser logs you went there. So does your ISP and the site your connecting to. No matter which mode or browser you use, if you go to Google, then Google knows you went there and logs your searches.
The closest you can come to browsing the web anonymously would be with a mix of dedicated privacy OS like Tails and either a VPN or Tor as a middile man, but that assumes those proxys are not corrupted. Free VPNs make money by selling your “secret browsing” habits.
The internet is nothing more than wires, if you connect your wire to someone elses, every intermediatary knows.
I’ve used Kagi’s free trial. I’d turn to it when nothing else was helping and it did really well, but recently it hasn’t been helping either. It’s probably still fine for most things, but I’m often searching niche developer/programming things that are too burried under SEO/AI spam to find anymore.
FWIW, the default “programming” lens works quite well in Kagi, you can also create your own lens if you have a set of websites from which you routinely search info, and there are tons of bangs already (which can also be mapped to lenses BTW). In addition, you can downrank AI/SEO stuff when you find it (it is downranked by default in kagi), so that over time your results are quite clean.
I was just about to try Kagi out and then ran into this post of a bunch of different search engines. Dogpile is not on there, so maybe I need to look it up now!
