37
votes
Long-term experiences with Google search alternatives?
I've tried DDG for some time, but I keep finding myself using !g to find better results. I read a comment on Reddit that you just need to get used to searching things differently, but I'm starting to think that DDG just isn't very good. Kagi works well and I use the free version a bit for academic stuff, but I don't see myself paying for a search engine. Anyone have long-term reviews of search engines like Brave, Qwant, etc.?
I like and pay for Kagi. I need to use the internet continuously throughout the day for work. If I don't pay with cash, I pay with monetization schemes that don't have my best interests anywhere on the list.
YMMV, and it's not like Kagi is perfect, but man am I sick of ads. Being able to browse without them is a breath of fresh air.
I really like
being able to universally prioritize domains I tend to find reputable (Wikipedia, StackOverflow, etc)
universally deprioritize domains I never want to see content from (Pinterest, Facebook)
it searches FOR WHAT I TYPE IN instead of what it thinks I want. If I search for how to solve a bug in DeDRM in Calibre on Linux, the first page of results aren't HowToGeek type articles on how to setup Calibre on Windows.
for real: your search operators work again!
It's search the way it used to be.
What I don't like
the hacky ways you have to set it up to work on Firefox to get all of the normal features, like autocomplete
especially on mobile
I can't set it as the default search engine system-wide on my Android phone. Google assistant / context menus will always through things into Google.
Their mobile app is ok, but it's better to just use it in a browser
Is it worth the price? I think so. DDG is pretty equivalent to Google in terms of the obnoxious behaviors. Kagi is super traditional search engine behavior.
I'm curious exactly how this works. My concern would be that, if Kagi strictly searches for exactly what is typed rather than intelligently incorporating synonyms and alternate spellings, it could lead to missing relevant results. For example, a search for "color" might not return results with "colour," or "DeDRM" might not match "De-DRM." This rigidity could make searches less effective, especially when users aren't aware of alternate terms commonly used for the same concept.
Though, having said that, I'm entirely too aware that Google has gone too far in the other direction with this. I feel like they had a happy medium on it at one point not too long ago but they've lost it.
Kagi already includes similar results that do not match the exact query. I regularly need to put some terms in quotes to make sure all results are relevant
To be fair to Kagi, this is definitely a Google limitation that affects any non-Google search engine.
Another vote for Kagi. I am currently unemployed (student). While I was planning my financials, my Kagi subscription was one of the few I planned on keeping unconditionally. It makes the internet usable and pleasant again. I couldn't imagine going back to Google, DDG, or Bing.
Based purely on your title, I was going to come in and recommend DuckDuckGo 🤷 I didn't have to adjust when coming from Google, and I get very useful results. I've been using DDG for about six years now and haven't looked back. Every once in a while I use Google when I just can't find something, but usually Google can't find it either in those cases. Can I ask what you felt wasn't very good about DDG?
I actually started with Brave (edit: in Brave browser) when switching from Google, but it turned me off with the crypto integration, ads, shady sponsored link swapping, and some other things.
Kagi seemed good but I also haven't paid for it and haven't used it long-term.
I switched to DDG after the Snowden leaks, and used it for a long time. At first it was pretty bad when searching for Norwegian things, because it would confuse Norwegian with Danish. (In their defence, the two lagnauges are very similar.) They fixed this by adding a region dropdown at some point.
Occasionally I would be frustrated by what I considered poor search results and do a !g, only to find almost the exact same search results in slightly different order in Google, so I'd say it's pretty much on par with Google when it comes to search results. It does lack many of the advanced search features Google has though, that 99% of users don't even know about. But whenever I learn about those cool features, I'm never able to remember them the next time I need them, so effectively I'm one of the 99% anyway.
I really want to like DDG, but I find the Reddit results a bit worse than Google and for academic stuff it doesn't even come close.
If you're regularly searching for recent Reddit results there isn't a true alternative to Google.
I remember that article and I haven't felt the impact nearly as much as I expected, if at all honestly. My reddit searches aren't usually for super-recent content however. Good extra info to have nonetheless.
Kagi is an exception. It's the only non-Google search engine to return recent Reddit results.
I wouldn't consider Kagi a true alternative to Google for recent Reddit results. As you quoted, they are reliant on Google for those results. If you're counting that as an exception, Kagi isn't the only one.
I'm a bit confused how it isn't an alternative to Google if it returns the same Reddit results as Google?
Because it's still google's indexing, juste with kagi as a middle man.
If you want to avoid google's ads, then getting it's results through kagi works fine. If you wan't to avoid using google at all(don't want to feed their monopoly, or suspect they might censor the results, I don't know) then kagi won't help.
Every search engine I'm aware of with recent Reddit results is reliant on Google supplying them. As @Pepetto mentioned, that may not matter to you depending on the reasons you're avoiding Google, but I don't consider them to be true alternatives for that use since the functionality is wholly provided by and dependent on Google.
I mainly wanted to correct your statement, "Kagi is an exception, the only non-Google search engine to return recent Reddit results." If Kagi qualifies, other search engines (such as those I previously linked) do as well, they just also rely on Google to do so.
That's probably fair given the Reddit-Google deal. I don't remember having issues with academic results when I was in grad school, but I also would use an actual academic/library search engine for that stuff instead of DDG/Google.
By academic stuff are you referring to Google Scholar?
I feel that it’s important to point out that one thing is Brave Search, another is Brave Browser. Those issues you mentioned are related to the Browser, not the Search
(Not saying that you should give it another chance or that one thing is independent from another, just pointing out for clarity sake)
Thanks! Good point.
+1 for Kagi. I came from DuckDuckGo and I found that it was actually pretty good for my needs at the time. Once AI-generated garbage results started getting more prevalent though, I was shopping around for another option, and I (like you) didn't see myself paying for search.
I decided to give it a try anyway, as I had been enjoying their small web initiative. Their trial option was 300 searches, and I gobbled them up in a few days. But the combination of zero-advertisement search, with the ability to raise/lower specific domains in the search results, and the lenses that Kagi offer had me absolutely hooked by the time my 300 ran out. I've now been a happy user for about a year, and it is well worth the £10 a month I pay.
I would wholeheartedly recommend you give Kagi a try with both feet.
The main problem I have with Kagi is that so much content online is now just pure AI slop. Even though Kagi is pretty good at finding relevant results, it's annoying when the results themselves are just ChatGPT output.
Surely the ability to block and prioritize different domains only helps with this, though? All search engines are going to suffer from AI content being present on the web, but those tools certainly don't make avoiding it harder.
It does, but I've often come up with entire pages of literal AI slop. I suspect its because Kagi relies so heavily on googles index, and google seems to love that type of content at the moment.
Unfortunately this problem is inherent to the modern internet. As soon as the ranking algorithm gets changed again, SEO marketers will figure out how to game the new algorithms with their spam.
One bandaid fix you can try is filtering the results by date. Only problem is plenty of older content is still garbage, and it's common for articles to be "updated" with one sentence or two to stay high-up in page rankings.
I've definitely had a much worse experience with AI slop on Google itself than with Kagi, but it is difficult to avoid regardless of which search engine you use these days.
I've been using Startpage as my default search for close to 10 years now and have no complaints. Very rarely do I find the need to visit Google search anymore, and even when I do try it doesn't really give me better results.
Have you noticed any change in Startpage since it was acquired by the advertising company System1 in 2019? I remember that there was quite a negative reaction to the deal back when it happened, but haven't heard much since.
I have not noticed any changes, FWIW. But I also was not aware of System1's acquisition. It is concerning to hear that a privacy focused search engine is now controlled by an ad conglomerate.
DDG works just fine for me. But I finf myself starting to use perplexity more and more often. It's really good at combining a few search results into one readable answer.
I've been off Google as my primary search engine for (checks notes) wow, probably more than five years now. I used DDG for most of that, with Google as a fallback, and switched to Kagi about a year and a half ago.
I failed to switch to DDG waaaaaay back in 2012 or so. The results were just too bad compared to Google. I'd have to fall back on nearly every search. In the time since, DDG has gotten a little better, and Google has gotten a lot worse. When I switched, DDG was worse, but no longer comparatively abysmal; my guess now would be that it's a little worse, but basically comparable. Neither DDG nor Google are very good these days. I think it's likely your difficulties with DDG are more because it's not very good than user error.
Kagi is… not as good as Google back when I first failed to switch away from it. But it is significantly better than Google now. They do a better job of filtering absolute garbage ("script tag", Kagi versus Google; note w3fools is nowhere to be seen in Kagi's results, but tops Google's, although also note that there's a lot of overlap between results), but the bigger strengths are probably the customization and more rigorous handling of search terms. (Also the lack of garbage nobody asked for, like instructions to glue cheese to pizza.)
As for whether it's worth paying for? I obviously think it is. I think I get my money's worth just from the smoother, more effective search experience; but I also think there's a significant value just from being the customer. A solid portion of Google's decline is straightforwardly attributed to the fact that Google Search users are Google's product, not its customers. Kagi's incentives aren't perfect, but being their customer aligns them far, far better than having your views sold to advertisers.
As for other options, I haven't really trialed any, because I'm pretty happy with Kagi; but I would definitely recommend avoiding Brave.
In my experience, DDG for non-English results was very bad, and next to useless for location-specific type stuff. For example, if I was looking for a bookshop in Lyons, searching in French, it was pretty useless. It became a bit of a joke between my partner on I to search for obvious things, but regionally, and just rag on the results from DDG.
Nevertheless, while I hate their search, I LOVE their email masking service and use that all the time and it works very well.
Kagi also has the ability to select which region to use for your searches, independent of which language you're using, and that's been a huge bonus for me -- for instance, when I was back visiting my family in the states I could switch the region to Germany so even my English-language searches would take that into account. And it's nice to be able to tell it to use "International" by default too.
One thing that makes me hesitant to pull the trigger on Kagi is that they do source a lot of their results from Google. So if one day Google pulls the plug on their API, Kagi's usefulness goes down the drain significantly.
I know that creating an entire-internet crawler is a massive undertaking. It requires significant computing resources, bandwidth, and storage. But if no one else does it, we're all still subject to Google's will.
I’ve been using SearXNG for a while, currently just public instances to get used to it, but eventually I will host my own, since the public ones tend to be overused.
It’s a free and open source anonymous metasearch engine with a lot of customization.
I've tried to use DDG over the years, but it never quite stuck.
At the moment, I've switched to Qwant on my phone, mostly because it's not US based. At least for casual, nonwork use, I'm liking it well enough to keep using it. It reminds me of a little of old-school Google, at least in the simple list layout.
Occasionally, I switch back to Google if I'm particularly stuck getting results for something, maybe 1 in 20 casual (nonwork) searches? A small annoyance, but If I'm looking for recent results I find it funny qwant doesnt offer an option for 'past year' (only up to past month).
I haven't yet tried it for work on my laptop, so can't opine on that usage.
Recently switched to Qwant myself, after Musk did a nazi salute at the inauguration and I realised it's more important than ever to support the European tech industry. Decently happy with the search results so far. One thing I really like about it is that the Android app is built on Firefox and not Chromium.
I have tried out a few Google alternatives and I haven't been blown away by any of them.
DDG and Bing were noticeably worse than Google when I tried them out for a month each.
I tried Kagi during the last "trial giveaway" post here, and it was better in some ways, worse in others, but wasn't the panacea I had hoped for and didn't encourage me to pay.
Startpage was fine, but I guess it should be since it is basically a privacy filtered frontend to Google search results.
Brave puts me off due to their heavy crypto association, so I am not going to bother.
I'm still on the lookout for a replacement, maybe I'll give Ecosia a try next. If anyone has any other recommendations, please share them.
Edit: I thought I should mention that there are is a Firefox extension that I've been using that gives you a lesser version of the Kagi feature of excluding some domains from search results, uBlacklist. Some people might find this useful.
What'd you find worse about Kagi? Personally, I find the location-based results for local businesses much worse, so I use bangs like
!gmto search Google Maps when I need a local business's hours.It was mostly location related searches while also some highly specific technical searches for work (which is where basically all of the other search engines do worse). Yes, I know I can use shorthand directives in kagi and ddg to specifically search google, but I guess that is the whole point of it being "a little worse" in some areas. I was having to frequently do two search and uses specific extra syntax instead a single standard search. If Kagi was free I'd probably have stuck with it, but this was enough friction to make me decide not to sign up and pay for it. If Kagi is still going strong in a few years, maybe I'll give them another go to see if it has improved enough (or if Google just gets worse and Kagi is better by comparison).