I used google for most of my life, for the past couple months I’ve been using brave search, but I still end up using google often because google images is far better than brave search images. I’m also worried that maybe brave search isn’t the best choice. What would you guys recommend?

  • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    I have used brave search which was really good I really liked the ai search although i moved away from it after seeing how bad google ai search was (saying things like its a good idea to eat rocks due to not being able to recognise satire) and I managed to get brave to do the same thing with a different onion article so i dont really trust any ai search now. At the moment I use searx it’s incredibly private especially if you are willing to self host (I am not) and you have so much customisation you can use any search index so you don’t have to worry about bad results.

    Qwant also seams really good although I haven’t tried it, same with ecosia especially if you like planting trees although I use an ad blocker so that doesn’t work for me.

    Imo there are so many great free browsers it’s not really worth paying for a browser.

    I also don’t recommend duck duck since it used to have a tracking deal with Microsoft. It doesn’t have it anymore but I think it’s enough to lose faith in it.

      • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
        11·
        4 days ago

        I don’t really see why this is relevant unless google or bing results are bad (and from my experience they are pretty good) since privacy focused search angines anonymize all search engine requests so you can’t be tracked by google or bing. Also that map really is outdated brave uses it’s own indexing now so it no longer relies on google.

  • Mountain_Mike_420@lemmy.ml
    527·
    7 days ago

    Stop using search engines and start using ai. Especially ai that links to sources is much better than weeding out the heavily influenced search results. Using ai is like opening 10 search results finding the relevant sources and comparing them all to bother the information down to a digestible nugget.

    • RandomVideos@programming.dev
      2·
      7 days ago

      Do you know which AI to use?

      Every time i tried it, it gave me wrong information or combined outdated information with current one

      • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        7 days ago

        I’ve gotten pretty good results from Perplexity. The responses contain links to sources, Wikipedia style, which enables me to verify the answers in the AI generated response.

        • phanto@lemmy.ca
          2·
          6 days ago

          Setting up docker to host a couple of containers from Linux is only a couple of commands, depending on your distro. Basically, install a few packages, create a group for docker, add yourself to that group.

          Harder in Windows, probably, but I’ve never tried it.

  • Marthirial@lemmy.world
    172·
    7 days ago

    I am paying for Kagi. Has worked well and some searched topics had been human curated so the answers are right there in the results. But it also does a good job with obscure searches, although it seems it tries to alter the meaning or context in order to show more results.

    Best feature is the ability to hide from the results shit sites like Reddit or Quora.

    • Syakaizin@lemm.ee
      11·
      6 days ago

      Same - I paid last year and it just expired, so I tried Brave Search, DDG and Startpage but they weren’t cutting it for me so I’ve just gone back to Kagi.

  • countrypunk@slrpnk.net
    5·
    6 days ago

    Marginalia isn’t a daily driver search engine, but it specifically gets you obscure results. Pretty nifty side-engine to have.

    • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      7 days ago

      I’ve been using DDG for a while but just got hit with an AI summary finally, like Brave and then Google does. It’s such a turn off. I trust the information exactly 0%. Definitely considering just using SearXNG full time now. I liked DDG a lot but I’m so fickle, it doesn’t take much for me to swap.

      • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
        121·
        7 days ago

        You can disable that. Here are two links that disable that. Add it to Firefox or Chromium through the settings.

        Simple, only disables AI answers: https://duckduckgo.com/?kbe=0&q=%s

        Long, disables AI answers and ads: https://duckduckgo.com/?kak=-1&kax=-1&kbe=0&k1=-1&q=%s

        Steps to create a custom DDG search config:

        • Visit: https://duckduckgo.com/settings
        • Select the settings you want, for example dark mode.
        • Click the “Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data” button.
        • Copy the link, using my dark mode scenario would yield the URL https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d
        • Edit the URL by adding &q=%s to the end, which acts as a placeholder for the browser to replace with your actual search query. Using my example https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&q=%s
        • Last step is add it to your browser. May differ between browsers, but generally look in the search engines tab of the settings.
        • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4·
          7 days ago

          Thanks for the tips but it says that it can be disabled right on the summary itself. The issue isn’t disabling it for me. It’s that the information is bad and I don’t want a search engine that thinks this is useful. Sorry for not making that more clear. That’s what I meant by me being fickle.