Ecosia. I like trees.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I'd use Ecosia still if it weren't for the fact that the filter is missing the "last year" setting. I'm a software engineer - 9 times out of 10, I want to find the bugs for a very specific version of a software, so having the year filter helps.
I now use Brave Search.
Fair point. I use ecosia to search everyday stuff on my phone and I've planted a lot of trees just by that. The results are fine.
At work for specific enquiries I use Google because I know how to get the details out of it at first. I don't remember doing a Google search without additional tags. F.i. At work I use visual basic a lot and since it's a shit language I have to Google everything including "vba excel". There's not a lot of logic to it, I just need to dive into the right post head on.
It points at a deeper problem though. There's sooo much garbage on the internet that I have no idea of how ordinary people are supposed to use it anymore. I'm not disenfranching anyone, but for someone like my mom. How the fuck is she ever going to get an answer of any search? Google just plain sucks by now.
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DuckDuckGo, and before that, I used ixquick(which is now StartPage).
Currently DuckDuckGo, but I will switch to SearXNG because of this.
Because of what? One idiot that broke his search engine somehow?
I typically use StartPage, sometimes DDG. Occasionally I pop in and check out how Brave Search is progressing, out of curiosity.
I would love to use Searx, but I've never found an instance where functionality wasn't breaking all the time or it just randomly goes offline. As much as I want to be, I've learned that I'm not much of a self-hoster. So, yeah, every time I try Searx, I wind up back at StartPage. If anyone has any solid, reliable instances they know of, I'd love to check them out.
DDG for everyday usage. Sometimes I try searching the same things on google just to compare results. I've tried searxng instances on and off in the past but its rarely been reliable for me and self hosting isn't really an option for me.
I tried DuckDuckGo for quite a while, but I consistently failed to find things that I knew existed, so would switch back to Google anyway.
example: I am publishing a serial over on Royal Road, and one of the things an author there with any amount of traction does is search for links and possibly re-hosts of their materials. Links are fine, but re-hosts are obviously a no-go and you want to report sites that do that and/or take other measures. Google would find sites tracking and linking when I searched, but DuckDuckGo did not find any of them.
Heck, DDG didn't even find most of the tech sites that my title happens to overlap phrases with. ("No Need For A Core?" manages to trip over conversations with server cores, which is hilarious for a high magic fantasy series). I just can't trust that it finds enough stuff.
I'll give a search on Duck Duck Go, and if I can't find what I need then I'll use Google.
But at this point I'm using Google Bard and ChatGPT more and more, at least at work.
I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.
SearXNG, searches every search engine and regroups them in a single list, alongside the very powerful "bang" variant they use ("!!" is like "!" for ddg, and "!" is to only search with this search engine, ":en" is to choose a specific shortcode language.)
I use Ecosia. It works quite well, and if I ever need to search something on Google instead (like a coin flip/stock ticker) you can just do #g or #yt for Youtube They also plant trees and are carbon negative
I use DuckDuckGo, but mostly as a "terminal to the internet". In a few keystrokes i've opened a new tab, navigated to the homepage (https://start.duckduckgo.com/), then used a Bang to do a direct search inside the particular site or thing i need. For many things specially tech questions i do fall back to Google though
Are you using DDG in addition to Kagi because of Kagi's limited number of searches per month, or because DDG does something better?
I'm a bit conflicted about Kagi because $5/month is a plausible price, but the limited number of searches seems like it would add an extra step of, "Do I want to use my limited search resource on this search?" to every search, which is an unwanted extra bit of friction.
I've been using Kagi for a couple weeks. I've so far found it to be excellent. One thing to note is it supports DDG-style bangs, and those don't count against your search quota, so getting used to using them for wiki, youtube, IMDB, etc., is worth it. I also bumped up to the $10 plan, just to wash out any second-guessing on searches, although the price even if you exceed your quota is pretty cheap, and it seems like most people probably do far fewer searches than I do.
I still find DDG to be pretty terrible, but I have very occasionally fallen back to google, mainly for specifically searches for businesses / services near me, that kind of thing, or for searches for very recent things - somebody had posted a screenshot of an article on IIRC Fortune Magazine's site. I wanted to read it, and it turned out the article was only a few hours old at that time. Google had it indexed, but Kagi didn't yet.
For more general searches and technical searches I do for work, though, it's been very very good, and those are the most important searches, to me.
I use DDG because I'm still not decided on whether or not Kagi is worth it. If there's no significant difference in the results returned by DDG, why pay for Kagi?
Duck duck go. Google for maps
I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search