Any search engines with information cards like Google?
The recent post on EU's search index got me thinking: the real reason I (personally) haven't been able to shift to other search engines (like duckduckgo; I currently cannot afford Kagi) is Google has these information cards that "summarize" useful information in an information card. For example, it can give you the recent results of the sports team you searched for. Or it can give you synopsis of a movie and the list of its cast and crew.
However, recently Google has started replacing these information cards with AI-generated content. Not to be against AI summaries, but the whole UX is pretty bad (I can't just click the cast member and go to their information card on Google); and it seems it is only going to get worse.
So my question: Are there any search engines that do this well?
I know duckduckgo has an information card which usually is a summary of the wikipedia page of whatever you searched for. I would use something like letterboxd or goodreads on the first go but I have found (a) the websites to be a bit clunky for a quick search (b) they are not as good for fuzzy search.
Unfortunately those APIs are expensive, so they're harder to find outside of paid search engines like Kagi.
DuckDuckGo with "bangs" might help Like you can do
!lb duneand it will go directly to letterboxd.I personally think Brave is a company of questionable morale and personally wouldn't want to use it but their search does have infoboxes.
Bing also does have infoboxes but as a terrible UX experience initially with an overload of clutter. Which you can mostly turn off but then you still get popups here and there and generally it is just as bad and often worse than google.
Right, bangs can be useful. Won't have the fuzzy searching but one step towards it. Bangs are hard to use on mobile though.
DDG does have plenty of them! They used to have a full list available, but for some reason they removed it. Here's an archived version from
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112025701/duck.co/ia
Most links are not archived unfortunately, but here's another old repo with a list of some
https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/tree/master/t
If you want to go self-hosted then both SearXNG and deGoog have plugins that give you information cards like Google.
https://docs.searxng.org/dev/result_types/infobox.html
https://degoog-org.github.io/community-extensions/
There's a LOT else you can do with self hosted search aggregators. I switched to degoog a couple months ago and haven't looked back.
Very interesting! I tried deGoogle and its search results seem ...interesting. As an example, I searched for “the fall TV series” and it gives search results of the show but also an information card about …the Pip Boy? something from Fallout series but it seems very out of place.
Weird! I can't really speak to publicly hosted degoog servers, only speak for the server I've set up and run personally.
My friend actually used to work on those info cards for Google search and quit his job after they tried to make him switch to tuning the AI summaries. Now he’s working on similar tech as a one-man startup.
That's great to hear. Truly I think my breaking point with Google was not having those instant information cards haha. I remember around 10 years ago people used to talk about the reason Google overcame other contemporary search engines was because of its clean one-click interface paired with decent search results. Guess we all become victims of our success.