this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself

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search engine megathread? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 2 months ago by ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.org to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml
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I'd like to start a thread for people to share what they're using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.

I'm doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my "stack" has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.

My (shitty and getting worse) solution:

  • DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG's relevance has been shit for its entire existence
  • StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
  • currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it's not easy to set up if you don't use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with

The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn't return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.

BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.

I'd love to hear suggestions.

tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines

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[–] kixik@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't know if your complain about serxng is something you'll eventually get with 4get. Whatever works at any time. See google and other search engines had been playing awful to searxng. At some point google will notice 4get instances and will take on them as well. On searx[ng] on the side one can see what has been suspended, denied, timed out, etc.

Time wise, 4get allows for only 1 engine at a time. searx[ng] allows for several no wonders it can take time. BTW the user can choose any of the engines per search they want. That of course can take more time. The point is that right now all search engines have taken it on searx[ng], and options are welcome. Self hosting is working better maybe because the search engines don't feel threaten by it.

The good thing is to have alternatives.

BTW, I thought google found the way to finally get rid of invidio, but it seems there are a couple of instances still working. Good !