this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Give SearxNG a try. There are browser plugins available for it. I was using Librey but I'm finding SearxNG to be better.
Why?
Because google is a turd sandwich? When alternatives are out there, people need to use them. Everybody was using yahoo or infoseek, or in case of somewhat intelligent people, altavista back in 1999. Every now and then you'd hear someone say something about google, and lo and behold, it was way better than those search engines. Now google sucks. A replacement will eventually arise.
You’re giving no information other than “switch”, I’m trying to prompt you to give an actual critique, and what you like about it that would get people to switch.
Aha. Well, so far I'm finding that it gives better results than I've been getting from google in years. I mostly search programming or linux related questions. It's another metasearch engine which goes through multiple search engines and presents you with the results it thinks are relevant. It will show you which search engine(s) it pulled each result from as well. Seems to almost completely get rid of blogspam and advertisements and just return real information.
Edit: Also, it brings back the cached feature
Much Later Edit: It is, in fact, very good at hiding advertising/shopping sites. I had to switch to google for a search the other day when I was looking to order something online because searxng had filtered out all of the etail sites in its results.
and Google is a turd sandwich.
google controls the portals through which many people search. Defaults will always be google when people are using android and or chrome. Yahoo, infoseek or altavista never had anywhere near a grip on people like google does today. It takes effort to change now, while in the olden days you just had to change your 1 start page on the browser, things are a lot more embedded and thus customers locked in. Thinking it will switch over to a better alternative like it did back then, purely because it is a lot better, is a bit naive I think, unfortunately.
SearxNG, much like original SearX, pulls data from a variety of search engines, reducing their bias, and also has great filtering options, including filters for academic/IT/social/etc.
Aside from that, it is decentralized and private. Everyone can kickstart their own SearX server, though it might need some minimal juice to work quickly.
And yes, it can be integrated to search from URL bar much like any other search engine. Some instances offer addons that set their one to default, tho you don't have to install anything, just add your preferred instance to the list of search engines, Firefox will prompt you on that, for example.