• 𝔽𝕩𝕠𝕞𝕥@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    Damn shame. I use DDG, but them consistently fucking up makes me want to switch. Though i don’t know of any alternatives.

    edit: thanks for the recommendations!

    • DrinkMonkey@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      Kagi. Privacy focussed, no ads, and excellent results with options for sorting preferred sources to appear at the top, or not. Costs money but man, it’s fast and good in the way Google was back in the day. Some plans also include anonymous access to a variety of LLMs though they are older models, and if they can run them locally, they do. Really liking it.

      • troed@fedia.io
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        1 day ago

        FWIW the founder of Kagi is adamant that subscribers must accept part of the subscruption money being sent to Russia (Yandex, fully govt-controlled) and has refused all attempts at excluding it. When questions started appearing he even tried claiming Yandex isn’t even russian.

      • smh@slrpnk.net
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        1 day ago

        I swapped to Kagi this month. It’s refreshing. I’ll probably end up on the $10/month plan. They also have a library pilot program I’m trying to get my academic library to look into.

        • DrinkMonkey@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          I used it for almost a year at the lowest tier, then got the couples plan more recently and it has high spouse approval factor, even though there was some initial setup

        • Sonalder@lemmy.ml
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          1 day ago

          Yeah it is dependant on Google and Google can do censorship. However from personnal experience (maybe it differ in different countries) Google does less censorship than Microsoft at least regarding their search engines.

    • HelloRoot@lemy.lol
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      1 day ago

      Best one is probably (in my opinion) selfhosting a searxng instance. It takes results from a dozen of engines (you configure which ones) and merges them according to the configured weights and some algorithmic magic.

      If you use public instances, the owner might have tuned the results to suit themselves and it returns garbage for your usecase. And also they frequently get timeouts because a lot of people use them. So don’t get turned off by trying a couple of them.

      Since I started running my own private instance I am super happy with the search results.

        • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 day ago

          Yeah, they advertise using only the context of the keywords of your current search. No storing of personal data, no profiling. They’ve had third parties review that. Seems fine to me.

        • Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 day ago

          Startpage’s majority shareholder is System1 who is an adtech company. We don’t believe that to be an issue as they have a distinctly separate privacy policy. The Privacy Guides team reached out to Startpage back in 2020 to clear up any concerns with System1’s sizeable investment into the service, and we were satisfied with the answers we received.

          From privacyguides.org