I would say that there isn't currently a "best alternative" but rather there is a small group of alternatives that each seem to have "use cases" as it were (shocker, kind of how it used to be in the 90s/00s before Google dominance). But even from person to person, people disagree on what the best use case for each is.

There's some focused more on "privacy" like DuckDuckGo and searX.

I've heard Bing has pretty good results for anything AI related for all Microsoft's investment in OpenAI.

I've heard good things about Qwant for music searches.

Someone else here in this thread just brought up Mojeek, which is supposed to be also privacy focused but includes searching by "emotion."

Presearch is decentralized, but I haven't looked "under the hood" of how its decentralization works.

Startpage is Google search results but behind a proxy so Google isn't getting your info when you search.

I mean, it seems like there's a lot of decent alternatives. I wouldn't be surprised if what's left of the shell of Yahoo! started investing in trying to outperform Google at this point.

[–] pfjarschel@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Kagi has worked REALLY well for me for all topics, but it is a paid service...

[–] vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.works 5 points 11 months ago

I am constantly evangelizing Kagi to all my tech friends. Thankfully I don't use mint or do CrossFit otherwise I'd be 3 for 3 and lonely. That said, it is really nice to have actual search results again. I toggle over to DDG when I have more ad based results in mind but avoid Google Search at all costs.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 11 months ago

You know the old saying, "you get what you paid for."

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've had a lot of issues with Bing, although it may have improved since I was really using it. AI has a tendency to "hallucinate," which is a problem if you are interested in results that well... exist.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 11 months ago

I've heard far more people using it for helping with simple coding exercises and helping them approach coding problems than I have heard of people using it for research.

I wouldn't be doing much of any research through AI for exactly that reason myself. It hallucinates too much.

So, like I said, it depends on what you're using each one for. People seem to be having success with Bing and programming, but less so with Bing and anything actually human-life related.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 2 points 11 months ago

Time to bring back dogpile methinks

[–] DontMakeMoreBabies@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I fucking hate this this is a thing again... We got past this because it was fucking stupid to have to swap between AltaVista, Askjeeves, Yahoo, etc.

Now we're literally at the same point. Just like with streaming services and cable.

At this point I just think the average person is a moron and when enough of them adopt something it goes to shit.

[–] Velonie@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

This might just be the best solution to keep things slightly more honest online though. With SEO targeting THE single search engine, it'll forever get gamed by irrelevant/ad based results. If everyone uses different search engines then SEO starts to fall apart

[–] BossDj@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the info.

Is DDG just straight Bing results but private and maybe minus AI stuff?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's just a bit more complicated than that:

When people search, we believe they’re really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, lyrics, weather, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (e.g., Tripadvisor), content site (e.g., Musixmatch), or dedicated source (e.g., Dark Sky) that does a better job of actually answering searches than a general search engine can with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources.

Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.

Partners and Privacy: As per our strict privacy policy, we never share any personal information with any of our partners that could lead to the creation of search histories. When we send a request to a partner for information used in search results, the transfer of information is proxied through our servers so it stays anonymous. That means our partners see those requests as though they came from us instead of our users, and no unique identifiers are passed in that process (e.g., your IP address). That way, we can work with partners to produce relevant search result pages, while keeping you anonymous to them (and us!).

So they use some in-house tools and they source other results "largely" from Bing.

In other words:

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I've been quite liking Kagi (paid). No search manipulation, no ads, good results, no tracking, no tying search to accounts, you can modify results yourself (remove pintrist, facebool results; pin Wikipedia results to the top of results; boost sites in your results that you use heavily, etc).

I've been using it for like, 5 months now? Rarely need to use bangs, the search is pretty damn good.

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Kagi seems to be the real deal. I'd say anecdotally it cuts my searches in half (If I had to do 4-6 searches to find something previously, now it's 2-3 max). Sometimes I will find myself accidently on DDG and I'll think, "Wow, why are these results all over the place?" DDG still edges out Google and Bing (actually I think it uses Bing as a backend for certain tasks).

[–] breakingcups@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I tried Kagi for a while but it wasn't as good as Google or DDG for me, especially in my native language. Too bad, I'd love paying for search.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago

I'm in the same boat. The results from Kagi just weren't good.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I tried Kagi briefly and the results were as good as google. Searches for stuff near me, programming questions, and travel related stuff were not helpful.

I live in Canada, so I wonder if there's some sort of regional prioritization.

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

I have searched for stuff in AHK, VB.net (helping a friend poke at code), and Lua (game stuff for myself), and it's been okay, but I don't code 'real' things anymore, kinda burnt out as a hobby a few years ago. I'm stateside.

[–] Gemini24601@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

Searxng is I think

[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ecosia for planting trees

[–] Chestrade@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

I used to have my default engine set to ecosia. I loved it, but their recent change in their privacy policy about giving information to Google was a big no-no for me.

[–] snowe@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago

Kagi is orders of magnitude better than DDG. I hated DDG results.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's just Bing with extra steps.

[–] keyez@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What is this referring to? I've been using ddg for the last 3 years or so and never really used bing

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

It's powered by Bing. You get the same results if you just use regular Bing without the bird decorations.

[–] RmDebArc_5@lemmy.ml -1 points 11 months ago

SearXNG has maximum privacy and results, but it’s a bit too complicated for the average person. DuckDuckGo has worse results than google because of Bing base, Startpage is similar to DuckDuckGo, but it has as good results as google. Brave search has good results and is not reliant on other search engines.