@aires i can add one onto that! DuckDuckGo map directions (which appears to just be Apple Maps?!) don't include biking or transit directions! i dont know if they ever did, im just trying to De-corpo my life more.

@aires
Lycos: *furiously urinates on floor* NO OPTIONS. YOU GET WHAT YOU GET

@aires@tiggi.es tbf $10/mo isn't too bad for more customizable Google with no tracking.

@aires You forgot YaCy. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy

I'd love to make a joke about it, but my experiences with it are way in the past. It was hard to install but nice to have. Your personal search engine, index based on what you actually looked at. Ate all your bandwidth to crawl websites.

@aires Searxng: "A little bit of everything, all of the time!"

@aires this is so accurate it hurts

@aires The whole Reddit thing still makes me really angry, it was basically the last usable search engine we had left....

@aires Ooh. I can weigh in on this one!

I started writing my own search engine and crawler. The index is uselessly small right now, but it prioritises written content and small websites.

https://rustysearch.org/

@aires Imma be that guy and point out that Google never actually gave results away for free.

@aires If you can afford it, it makes sense to pay for stuff. I think Kagi has been doing a great job so far, let’s how it goes 🤞

@aires oh well done! 👏👏👏

@aires And:

@Mojeek: We’re a European company that are actually crawling and building our own search index – we are everything that DuckDuckGo claims to be and more – we even spearhead an anti-AI extension to website crawling settings to prove it

@aires This is why I use ecosia.

@aires i tried using ask.com recently out of morbid curiosity and it is comically bad. Like so bad I don't know why they even bother. look at this

@aires
That's why if Alta Vista doesn't have the answer for me, I don't need it!
@TinaStormcaller

@aires it's a sad story, because your'e right. 100% true! 😭

@aires We need a Wikipedia model for search. Depending on commercial interests was always a trap waiting for the opportune moment.

#GBOD

@aires this is why i just ask fedi things now!

@aires
User: how do I kill myself?

Google Then: Noooo here’s the phone number for the lifeline we love you don’t die

Google Now: Reddit suggests jumping off a bridge

Bing: Here’s how to tie a noose a list of gun shops fatso

DDG: Suicide is when you kill yourself, read more on wikipedia

@aires I think the entire concept of search is dead and not likely to come back.

@aires

@moondog548
I use Northern Lights

@aires
Brave: "We actually have good results, but you have to disable the AI answers section and ignore Reddit links."

@aires

What about Ecosia?

@aires I'm old enough to remember Ask Jeeves. That makes me very old, damn 😂 😭

@aires I propose we start a crowdsourced search service that consists of just asking people on social media for recommendations.

Anyone know of a search engine like this?

@aires Google has to throw out their old algorithms because the Web has been SEOed to fuck, and most of what Google was finding were auto-generated fake review sites with affiliate links. They are going all in on AI because it's all they have left. And it won't work, because the spammers are already cranking up their own generative sludge farms

@aires duck duck fedi: gay

@aires me: grep through the bookmarks and bookmarked open tab collection from a firefox from an old home dir backup from 15 years ago "ah I knew I had this somewhere!"

@aires
Lycos: hey, how'ya been? It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, here's some perfectly reasonable search results without AI nonsense. Y'all come back again soon. Hey, did you know I still run this cool thing called angelfire.lycos.com?

@aires @cstross

Ask.com still exists?! I didn't know that.

@aires Too close to home. 🙂

@aires there's also Lycos, which is surprisingly good now.

@aires mojeek.com: what would be third or fourth place in 2008 is miles better than current Google/Bing. Not great at tech topics, but you’ll probably get at least three interesting links in the first page of results

@aires nailed it

@aires

You forgot @mojeek :) The only european searchmachine with it's own index.

It means it's 100% not using google, bing, yahoo or any other american corporate crap.

https://www.mojeek.com

You're welcome.

@aires Kagi allows you to family share with 5 more people for family price $20... Still terrible tho.

@aires

Well, personally I use Yandex image search a LOT. Particularly reverse image search.

The web search still sucks though...

@aires I suggest you look at @MetaGer

@aires $5/month*

@aires anyone check on lycos?

@aires@tiggi.es Has Stract done anything evil yet?

@aires And what about YaCy? Oh, let me try: after hours of scrapping and hours of indexing you basically hit a wall of their architecture and it does not scale enough for what you would like to search for (or index). Uhm.

@aires@tiggi.es kagi is worth 10 bux a month

@aires For a while, it looked like the internet and modern (old Google) search engines were going to make librarians and curated databases redundant. But now, the opposite is true.

If you want information related to electronic engineering, then the search engine at https://xplore.ieee.com will still find what your are looking for.

There are similar databases for all fields of knowledge, if you know the ones to use; and librarians know what they are.

Electronic libraries staffed by humans FTW

@aires Don't forget startpage, which is basically the duckduckgo answer, but minus bing and plus google.

@aires @mynameistillian One thing Yandex is good for is that its image search is way more competent than Google's ever was. It's weird.

@aires Check out https://search.marginalia.nu/, it's very good for small websites.

@aires TIL I learned about Kagi. I will admit, I'm very curious.

@aires
SearxNG
https://github.com/searxng/searxng

It's painless to install on your own pc with linux. You can tell it which engines you like (or hate) and how to weight them. And it may also search your local joplin notes and display them along with the rest of the results.
It's fast and better.
Why use any other proxy, but your own?

@aires

I miss #AltaVista

@aires soooo true!

@aires I've been told that if you dig into Kagi's technical details, it's just Google.

@aires@tiggi.es have mojeek fuckdd up yet?

@aires startpage ?

@aires perplexity.ai: „we never had decades of search knowledge and try really hard to make up a slightly less made up answer then Google“ ;)

@aires
How does SearxNG fit in this analogy?

@aires
@brave is building up their own index.

@aires now do startpage.com? (Google engine... )

@aires I use www.startpage. com
not listed.

@aires so the only viable option is to pay kagi those $10 a month. That actually makes sense.

@aires

SwissCows: "Here are some results that might actually be related to your search. You speak German, right?"

@aires it's time to start over. It's time for a new search engine.

@aires Kagi is worth its prince

@aires for UK readers, https://www.mojeek.com/ who claim their own crawler

For Spanish readers, have you tried Metager (DE), or Startpage (NL) , or Qwant (FR). I don't know a Spanish ~ the state ~ specific search.

I hope I didn't repeat anything you mentioned...

@aires I started using Lycos on my phone, it's a bit like the 90s: minimal design, no preview, no images, no ads and I always have a useful result on the first page.

@aires Yandex is search engine russians made themselves, and it focuses more on cyrylic part if the internet, but damn noone is better at obscure electronic stuff. I was searching google and ddg for pinout of a part for hour or so, i've checked yandex and it was on top, not only this pinout, i've got schematics with big watermark saying that this document is confidential.

@aires

Whenever I see variations on this, I feel like we need to start including Wikipedia on the list of search engines. It isn't one, but sometimes it feels like we're getting to a place where it will be the best tool for actually finding the link you want.

I've been enjoying Qwant (https://www.qwant.com). Feels a bit like pre-2010 Google. Bang, useful results with minimal corporate marketing.

@aires Waiting for @Mojeek's CM to add something funny here

@aires As someone who dailies DuckDuckGo, the description of it made me chortle 😁

@aires And we get this kind of garbage…

@aires yacy?

@aires Baidu: We have ads all over the place, but are unpoisoned by AI so far. Here are your search res<...needle scratch...>In accordance with government regulation some of the results have been removed.

@aires the public library: closed for funding cuts justify by low visitor numbers

@aires@tiggi.es

stract: these are certainly results. "for what ??" a search.

@aires you missed Startpage and Brave search

@aires I remember as a kid I used Yahooligans (the kid version of Yahoo)

@aires
Obviously Kagi is the only choice, but how long before it too gets enshittified?

@aires

i tried Kagi, which is better than google but not enough to justify $10 a month

ublock makes google a little better

fingers crossed for mojeek

@aires

tools like #DevonAgent might be the future. too complicated by far but the core idea is good

@aires @dbinkowski Perplexity.ai

Please just try it so we can move on from this endless discussion to something productive

@aires Bing should read more like Yandex. i.e., "Here are all the Microsoft-owned sites with that information."

@aires Trying to think of a clever append for Neeva and how it never had a chance…