I’d like to start a thread for people to share what they’re using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.

I’m doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my “stack” has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.

My (shitty and getting worse) solution:

  • DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG’s relevance has been shit for its entire existence
  • StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
  • currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it’s not easy to set up if you don’t use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with

The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn’t return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.

BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.

I’d love to hear suggestions.

tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines

  • paequ2@lemmy.today
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    3 days ago

    currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results

    This is one of the killer features for me in Kagi. The ability to buff or debuff websites in the results. Whenever I encounter an AI slopsite, I immediately block it in Kagi and it’ll never show up again. Other websites are annoying, but occasionally return good results, so I’ll just debuff them in the search results.

    Arch Linux forums? Guix mailing list? Max buff!

    That being said, I do wish there was a more open source friendly alternative or a search engine that didn’t just rebrand Bing or Google results. Maybe SearXNG or Mojeek?