• qyronEnglish
    72•1 year ago

    Okay.

    Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?

    I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.

    What other options are there?

    Edit:

    For those who may be arriving now:

    • Kagi seems to be a good option for an alternative search engine; it is a paid service, for which I don’t have the €€€ right now. Many speak very well about it.
    • SearXNG is a thing as well, to my understanding a decentralized search system. Worth the try, in my opinion. If it’s something that is decentralized, it is worthy to support and divulge.
    • There is mojeek.com, supposedly not very good but any option that goes against the monopoly is worth the try! I’m going to try this one.
    • Brave.com is an option but is a bit shady.
    • You should try Ecosia if you want to support reforestation efforts. Read somewhere in the thread it is part of the Bing ecosystem.
    • Yep is a thing as well. Somewhere in the thread, a lemmy points they use the search results for AI trainning. So… That is that.
    • And it seems there is a search engine by the name of dogpile.com.
    • Startpage is another search engine (portal?) suggested by another user. I’ve used it before and like it. Read somewhere it somehow piped a standard google search but removed tracking and ads.
    • and I just remembered Presearch.com. This is a really shady one (crypto warning!) that I suspect is a fork/collab with Brave Browser. I’ve used it, they have reward-per-search reward system (or had) where they give you crypto for every search. Good results, some that don’t come up neither on DDG nor Google.

    p.p.s Should I start categorizing these from “shady” to “worthy”?

    p.p.s 2 Does anyone remember StumbleUpon? I know it was never a search engine to begin with but it was the best source of good internet content I ever got acquainted to.

    Can we get something like that back?

    • @joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9•1 year ago

      That’s a nice hobby

      I would suggest you to install a local instance of a LLM (mistral or llama3 for example) to widen your source of information. Go straight to Wikipedia instead of “googling” it if you don’t already.

      Anyway, I didn’t know about kagi so I might take my own advice and give it a try.

        • @joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          Most of 7b-8b models run just fine in 4bits quant and won’t use more than 4 or 5 GB of VRAM.

          The only important metric is the amount of VRAM as the model must be loaded in VRAM for fast inference.

          You could use CPU and RAM but it is really painfully slow.

          If you got an Apple Silicon Mac it could be even simpler.

          • Venia SilenteEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            I have an Intel Celeron Mobile laptop with iGPU and, I think, 256MB VRAM. How many bs does that get me for the LLM?

            Only half-joking. That’s my still functional old daily driver now serving as homelab

            • @joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2•1 year ago

              Well, I got a good news and a bad news.

              The bad news is you won’t do shit with that my dear friend.

              The good news is that you won’t need it because the duck is back.

    • @Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      There’s a new search engine called Yep, made by the team at Ahrefs, a SEO tool SaaS.

      It looks promising because they have their own index, but it’s a bit slow sometimes.

      • noodle (he/him)English
        11•1 year ago

        We may collect aggregated, non-personal search data to improve search algorithms, train AI models

        ugh

      • @AeroLemming@lemm.eeEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        I only tried one example, so the sample size is pretty small, but that search engine seems pretty bad. I tried looking up “rust bevy points” in both Google and Yep. The first Google result is a library to draw points in Bevy and the rest are pretty relevant. Yep simply doesn’t have that result at all and all of their results are just generic results about Bevy.

        I tried DDG for the sake of comparison and it’s somewhere in-between. The results are mostly relevant and the “correct” result is still on the first page.

    • EvehnEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Just letting you know kagi has a family plan with unlimited searches, so you can probably split it with family or friends! I have yet to see how searxng search holds up to kagi.

    • @Shellbeach@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      I jumped back on ecosia. It’s nice there, but I’m sure there are issues that a non tech person like me may not know about

      • qyronEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Read somewhere on the thread Ecosia is part of Bing ecosystem.

        • TwigEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          It is. That or it was very coincidentally down for the exact amount of time as DDG.

    • @Facebones@reddthat.comEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I run a searxng instance on my pi server, use it from all of my devices, honestly forget its a thing running from my office 99% of the time until I’m rebooting the pi for one reason or another and spend more seconds than I’d like to admit wondering why I can’t run a search 🤣😅

    • @jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Was this news to you? Other than Google and Bing there aren’t any other significant alternatives. Even brave is a bit limited.

          • qyronEnglish
            3•1 year ago

            Today, I was the 1% getting to know something new.

    • @sugartits@lemmy.worldEnglish
      -1•1 year ago

      Just pay the extra for unlimited searches. It’s not much money, especially if it’s a tool for work.

      • @Jarix@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21•1 year ago

        Listen sugartits, some of us don’t have much money. So if it’s not much money we still don’t have it

        (Mostly i just wanted to point out your username by using it in a comment)

        • qyronEnglish
          10•1 year ago

          That was one of the most out of the blue comments I have ever read. It sounded so… unreal. Something out of a sitcom. Then I read “sugartits” is the name of the lemmy you were replying to. That’s was really top mark. Kudos for you.

      • qyronEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        It’s a hobby as it is.

        If I ever manage to sell enough copies of it to be able to pay for a Kagi subscription, I’ll do it and make it public knowledge.