Submitted 1 year ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/321967c5-33dc-44e8-af0f-00bfb9d50cf1.jpeg
Is there any good search engines? I mean I’ve tried searching recently for a solution I referenced 3 months ago and it’s disappeared from Google and Bing.
Shit, even looking up repair information for a household appliance if can’t find the model before the newest and it all points to a sale page for the newest version.
Maybe AkJeeves!?
Kagi is meant to be okay, but it’s paid.
There’s also SearX which you could self host.
I second Kagi with the additional mention of their “lens” feature that allows results to be restricted to scholarly sources which is very relevant to the meme’s search needs.
scholar.google.com hasn’t been quite as enshittified
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now, and I never went back to Google. Maybe give it a try !
My understanding is that duckduckgo is just Bing without tracking, I also have used it for a few years to decent success but figure it’s worth noting
I use duck duck go but sometimes I just have to use google.
Use same search terms etc and can’t get what I want.
Do you have history enabled on your browser?
Really curious what your last say 10 non-private searches were.
Asking as I’m constantly going back to Alphabet Adware Search (!g). If I just wanted the homepages of Fortune 500 companies I could use DDG exclusively, but I look for:
And much more I can’t think of right now. For all of the above, I end up banging out of DDG (by adding !g) for Google. At least until I get in the habit of using SearXNG.
The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it’s written by a human (LLMs).
I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.
If they’d present you with all that spam content, you wouldn’t find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it’s written by a human, they’re going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.
There’s also at least some measurements, that search results are decidedly getting worse: theregister.com/…/google_search_results_spam/
So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse…
I get my best results with either Duckduckgo or with Searx. Neither run their own index but the independent index searches I’ve tried have been straight up ass. It seems right now the best thing you can do is simply escape the curated personalized results bubbles
Somehow I trained my bubble well entirely by accident, because for the most part google still gets me the results I look for with an ok success rate
kagi
Mozilla recently announced some kind of partnership with Qwant. Hadn’t heard of it before, and I was highly skeptical (I’m a very cynical person). I tried it out and honestly I think it gives me on-average better results than Google and Bing does. Since it doesn’t track you it doesn’t personalise the results at all, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t have any ads, though I do use an adblocker so don’t quote me on that. It’s also very snappy. Bing often has long loading times for me, which was incredibly frustrating.
The only way crystals can heal you is if that crystal is salt and your illness is a salt deficiency.
What if I’m bleeding out from a gunshot wound and I have a crystal that is sufficient diameter to plug said gunshot wound?
Helps not die. Not so much heal.
To be fair; pretty common.
You could probably use crystals of other elements to treat other deficiencies too, such as iron? But it’s probably easier to just take an iron tablet or eat some food containing iron 😂
scholar.google.com is where you want to go.
Also, in my Google-fu experience technical terms work well for finding better scholarly results.
Same experience I have had. Swapping to scholar gets me relevant results that aren’t filled with ai gibberish and backwater Hokum. Still have to be careful about study sizes and sigma values and applicability, but miles ahead for at least getting to that being my issue.
Putting scientific in the search criteria should redkrect there then.
At the very least, it might be nice if they ask you if you want to go there instead.
On the other hand, I’m just happy that Google Scholar hasn’t gotten completely destroyed by SEO yet.
What’s the scientific term for rocks?
In fairness, I was thinking specifically of plants. I expect better results when looking up “S. lycopersicum” than “tomato”.
An example off the top of my head is saying pyrite instead of fool’s gold.
I still remember trying to find the space group for Copper Telluride. No amount of technical terms could help me there.
I don’t even get “did you mean” anymore. Just, we found more examples of this, so this must be what you meant.
Even DuckDuckGo straight-up tells you “we didn’t find many results containing [blank].” Yeah. That’s why I wrote [blank.]
“There are a lot of results that aren’t what you’re looking for.”
Okay, great?
For those looking for some Google alternatives:
Feel free to add on any I missed or opinions on these; I haven’t used any extensively
Brave uses its own index. It used to be supplemented with results from other engines but I believe they have now phased that out.
Brave is the best of the free options in my experience, and it supports “bangs” which let’s you send your querry to a different engine (typing “how far is it to the sun !g” will pass the search to google. Duckduckgo also supports bangs), this is especially helpful for image searches (!gi for google images) since braves image search sucks dogshit 😅
Quant seemed like the second best free option in my experience. Some people don’t like brave as a company for various reasons, so quant may be a good option for those folks. Its my understanding that Mozilla has worked with quant in some way, which is kinda neat.
Both have their own index making them a sustainable/viable option going forward, where meta search engines that use other engine’s results are at the whim of those they fetch the results from (but may provide better results by piggybacking off a larger successful engine)
Thank you for the corrections! I’ve updated the post. I agree that Brave search had the best results/UX. As you mentioned, I have my own moral qualms with brave as a company.
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
Source: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
Source: metager.org/lang
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And has other useful features, for example:
[…] you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.
Source: metager.org/tips
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
Ecosia uses the money they generate with ads to plant trees 🌿 (I think it’s bing on the backend)
Added! I love the mission
Kagi user here.
Bought a month to test it and then went for a year immediately afrer. I really like it!
I’ve had similar sentiment from other users! I’m inclined to give it a shot
Brave Search does not use Google and Bing. And why did you skip over DDG?
I’ve updated the post to say that in Brave uses a custom index. I skipped DuckDuckGo because it only uses Bing :(
Qwant was good until they georestricted it for no reason
Try Andisearch, it was the first AI search ever and apart is one of the most private search engine which even actively protect your ID, no ads, no tracking, no logs, anonymous.
Adding as search engine in your browser
https://andisearch.com/?query=%s
Perplexity, well, is still one of the more private AI, but best to use the extension which works well and anonymous (logs only tech data), Chromium only. In Firefox you can use perplexity only as search engine from the website itself.
Don’t forget DuckDuckGo.
Added!
Ever died from smallpox while holding a healing crystal?
Didn’t fucking think so 😎
I’m not sure what exactly you’re typing into the search field, but I don’t anything like this. The top 3 sites I get for a search of “minerals” are wikipedia, australian museum, and britannica. Typing in “crystals” gets me a healthline article debunking crystal healing, but the following results are some woman’s personal store and amazon. Lastly, being direct about wanting scientific articles gets me said articles…
Side note: Why are there so many people pushing for kagi in this thread and skipping over the fact that duckduckgo exists? It’s kinda bizarre to see.
I’ve commented about potential Kagi astroturfing here before.
Seems likely to me.
Their trial - too short for me - felt like a private Google w/improvements.
Now, as a filthy freeloader, my default is DuckDuckGo. I am dissatisfied with the results and !bang out to Google (!g) about half the time. I pray DDG makes use of this data to improve their engine.
tl;dr astroturfing vs. bad results vs. enabling the king of adware
Gosh I need to set up SearXNG! Also “private Google” vibes. Instances here
Half the time?
I switch to another search engine about 1 in 100
Hell, typing in “scientific data bout minerals” gets me a bunch of university geology department websites.
Why not just use Google scholar?
This scene live rent free in my head. Also fuckin Crystal Healing types make me look bad when I just think pretty rocks look nice
Aaaaannd this is why I use Kagi. The site ranking feature let’s me block or down rank sketchy sites. (And lets you boost credible sites.)
As a gem and mineral collecting hobbyist I feel this pain so, so much.
It looks like OP tried to write $99.99 but got drunk and wrote it backwards
God I had this issue looking for used wheels for my car. Like, actual wheels to use for a track day, but results showed nothing but simracing threads for used STEERING wheels.
Google decides what you want to see and what you want to see is right wing garbage.
Like multivitamins? (Also contains minerals!)
Mullvad Leta?
Duckduckgo lite?
duckduckgo onion?
Brave search?
What are some others?
SerXing?
Startpage?
Several different very privacy friendly browsers have those in them by default.
“scientific data about minerals -crystal -healing” should do it
Psyhub is pretty useful for most articles behind a paywall.
Ah yes I love the science of rock and rock accessories
I thought crystal healing was limited to common minerals like quartz? Anything niche shouldn't be on their radar
Good job little buddy!
I have no need for any search engine not specifically designed to be accessed through Tor, at this point; Startpage has an official Onion now: startpagel6srwcjlue4zgq3zevrujfaow726kjytqbbjyrsw…
IT’S BUCKET O NOTHING
Asafum@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Image
ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 1 year ago
… accurate
SeekPie@lemm.ee 1 year ago
My favourite mineral - potato.
whodatdair@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Russian in origin, if I’m not mistaken