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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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I vehemently hate when any website hijacks my web browser's ctrl+f or forward slash keyboard shortcuts for searching the page.
It's completely insane to me that javascript can override web browsers' builtin keyboard shortcuts.
I remember reddits search function a complete failiure. Even if I entered the precise title of a post, it could not find it. But it found hundreds of completely unrelated posts.
some time ago i realized it's better to find youtube videos on video.google.com.
yandex is pretty good these days but is full of captcha, luckily eTools doesn't have much and pulls from multiple engines including it.
I'll try that. thanks
Amazon
I've never gone to a website and searched for socks and been shown bicycles before.
Agreed, which I know is on purpose trying to get you to spend more time on the site and see more things that could be impulse buys.
Used to be Reddit's.
These days, it's Google's.
Honestly, at this point Reddit's search doesn't even really feel worse than the competition. Its terrible at fuzzy searches, yes, but the fact that it has functioning search operators that it consistantly respects is so useful. Being able to search "(add OR insert OR update) AND (rest OR restful) NOT sql" is so useful.
Of course, a good fuzzy search would also be great, but no one offers that anymore, so...
when i want to search for specific things on reddits search bar, it kinda "hallucinate searches" totally unrelated to what you want.
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I haven't used google in 3-4 years. Is it even worse now?
It's been going pretty steadily downhill for about 10 years now, but with the addition of the AI bullshit on top of the other SEO issues, it's basically useless now.
Ah. Even duckduckgo added ai.
Plus they dont use the best models which makes it even worse
There’s at least has an easily acceptable option to disable it
Yeah but only if you keep cookies enabled. The default Librewolf settings has the bullshit AI come back every time, so its still somewhat of a pain.
Iirc DDG had a feature that allowed you to save its settings without cookies as a url. So you might be able to bookmark it with ai disabled and then it should also work in Librewolf
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In the last two years it became extremely bad at actually searching what you typed, and not what 'ai' interpreted as what you actually want to see.
Reddit is the first one that comes to mind for me, too. It was always easier to use a search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo and do thing I'm looking for site:reddit.com instead of actually using Reddit's search feature.
I switched to Kagi a year ago. It's free for first hundred searches so you can see what it's like. If you like it you can pay for it. I know paying for a search Engine is very niche, but I use my search Engine for both work and personal, it's a tool and frankly you've already hit the nail on the the head with everything else just being shit. Between rubbish results and poor privacy, I really am happy that I have Kagi as an option. The price per year ain't bad for how much I use it and I'm happy my money is going to devs rather that aren't selling my data
I also like Kagi and I think it's the best search engine nowadays. I'm just sad because it's based in the US.
When I used Brave the image search was extremely bad. I bet it still is
I work in ecommerce, so the answer is "ours". I get far too many calls saying "Do you sell x", or "How much is y", and because of how terrible our website's search function is, I can't just say "use the fucking website, that's what it's there for" like I desperately want to.
In addition to what you mentioned, another really annoying thing about Youtube's search is that it sometimes gives totally different results from one minute to the next. You can search for something, then type those exact same words just a few seconds later, and you get a completely different list of videos. So if you ever do get a list of good results, you need to leave that browser tab alone and open a new one to keep those results "safe."
And even though you typed the exact title of the video you are searching for, it will never be the first result...
Github. The / key is usually a shortcut in Firefox (and many other software) for search. But they hijacked it to their search-field that requires you to be logged in anyway. So you can only use ctrl+f on their site.
For websearch I've switched to Kagi and it does exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less.
In general, anything that hijacks search shortcuts.
Oh you wanted to search for text on this one page? Let me show you a search bar for the whole website instead, with a search that's strictly worse than the search engine that you came from in the first place.
I guess it's not surprising that this is also a google thing, but gmail's. No matter what I type in it shows me my entire inbox practically. It's so fuzzy it's completely useless.
I currently hate all search engines. If I have to type reddit at the end of every search, it is not really a search engine.
I don't know about Google, but DuckDuckGo sometimes even shows completely opposite things, even when I write Reddit at the end... finding something very specific or niche is a challenge.
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Anyone using Mojeek?
Their about page: https://www.mojeek.com/about/
I've tried but their search results in my language were bad.
Sorry to hear that. Do you get better results with SearXNG?
Heard of it, havent yet tried it
Damn, I too went to this same route of Google -> duckduckgo -> Searx. While it is true searx is unreliable at times, if you enable more engines and find an instance that has anti botting features, it should be pretty solid
What instance are you using?
There are 2 instances that use anti bot features that I could find. That is https://search.canine.tools/ and https://search.fredix.xyz/
Personally, the fastest and most reliable in my opinion are https://priv.au/ and https://searx.tiekoetter.com/ I used to use Tiekoetter's instance for nearly a year before I hosted my own. Otherwise I would recommend checking here: https://searx.space/
With that said, I still didn't answer your question, because I am hosting my own instance, but I would not recommend joining unless you really want to. I'm going to move it to central Europe, it's currently hosted in Romania.
Just tried priv.au and like it better than my current instance. Just moved. Thanks for the recommendation
Self hosters impress me. Thanks for the recommendations, I've been confused about what to try for a while
Not the person you replied to, but: my own on my server. Con: I have to do the administration. Pro: I started using it, noted my preferred default settings and just set those as a server side default where possible. Also I have full control over which engines are enabled per default and which are available generally.
Took me a bit to tweak it, though.
Damn, is it actually Eivith? Thanks for all the support help in the Matrix chat
Yes, im in the Matrix chat - thanks!
That's really cool. Very daunting a task to go through with
Assuming you do have a place to host it (even at home on your PC, or an old PC, not necessarily reachable from the internet), and assuming you know a bit about docker, it's quite easy actually.
Where it all started for me: https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker
Note that the example above in the beginner variant uses Caddy as a webserver which - by default - assumes you're running it on a server that can be publicly reached from the internet and won't start up correctly otherwise - e.g. at home - unless you change some config.
I'm the least techy person on Lemmy. Couldn't possibly do any of that. But I really appreciate the effort you put in for the advice. Thanks!
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It's getting to the point where it's better to just straight up ask Claude, not gonna lie.
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