• qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    77·
    6 months ago

    Okay.

    Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?

    I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.

    What other options are there?

    Edit:

    For those who may be arriving now:

    • Kagi seems to be a good option for an alternative search engine; it is a paid service, for which I don’t have the €€€ right now. Many speak very well about it.
    • SearXNG is a thing as well, to my understanding a decentralized search system. Worth the try, in my opinion. If it’s something that is decentralized, it is worthy to support and divulge.
    • There is mojeek.com, supposedly not very good but any option that goes against the monopoly is worth the try! I’m going to try this one.
    • Brave.com is an option but is a bit shady.
    • You should try Ecosia if you want to support reforestation efforts. Read somewhere in the thread it is part of the Bing ecosystem.
    • Yep is a thing as well. Somewhere in the thread, a lemmy points they use the search results for AI trainning. So… That is that.
    • And it seems there is a search engine by the name of dogpile.com.
    • Startpage is another search engine (portal?) suggested by another user. I’ve used it before and like it. Read somewhere it somehow piped a standard google search but removed tracking and ads.
    • and I just remembered Presearch.com. This is a really shady one (crypto warning!) that I suspect is a fork/collab with Brave Browser. I’ve used it, they have reward-per-search reward system (or had) where they give you crypto for every search. Good results, some that don’t come up neither on DDG nor Google.

    p.p.s Should I start categorizing these from “shady” to “worthy”?

    p.p.s 2 Does anyone remember StumbleUpon? I know it was never a search engine to begin with but it was the best source of good internet content I ever got acquainted to.

    Can we get something like that back?

      • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        This is the single most obnoxious name I’ve ever seen. But, the service could be good (I’ve never used it)

    • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      167·
      6 months ago

      That’s a nice hobby

      I would suggest you to install a local instance of a LLM (mistral or llama3 for example) to widen your source of information. Go straight to Wikipedia instead of “googling” it if you don’t already.

      Anyway, I didn’t know about kagi so I might take my own advice and give it a try.

        • vale@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          6 months ago

          Take a look at Ollama.ai, just follow the installation instructions. A decent GPU is recommended, and the models are around 10GB iirc.

        • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          Most of 7b-8b models run just fine in 4bits quant and won’t use more than 4 or 5 GB of VRAM.

          The only important metric is the amount of VRAM as the model must be loaded in VRAM for fast inference.

          You could use CPU and RAM but it is really painfully slow.

          If you got an Apple Silicon Mac it could be even simpler.

          • Venia Silente@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            I have an Intel Celeron Mobile laptop with iGPU and, I think, 256MB VRAM. How many bs does that get me for the LLM?

            Only half-joking. That’s my still functional old daily driver now serving as homelab

            • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              6 months ago

              Well, I got a good news and a bad news.

              The bad news is you won’t do shit with that my dear friend.

              The good news is that you won’t need it because the duck is back.

    • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
      61·
      6 months ago

      There’s a new search engine called Yep, made by the team at Ahrefs, a SEO tool SaaS.

      It looks promising because they have their own index, but it’s a bit slow sometimes.

      • noodlejetski@lemm.eeEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        We may collect aggregated, non-personal search data to improve search algorithms, train AI models

        ugh

      • AeroLemming@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        I only tried one example, so the sample size is pretty small, but that search engine seems pretty bad. I tried looking up “rust bevy points” in both Google and Yep. The first Google result is a library to draw points in Bevy and the rest are pretty relevant. Yep simply doesn’t have that result at all and all of their results are just generic results about Bevy.

        I tried DDG for the sake of comparison and it’s somewhere in-between. The results are mostly relevant and the “correct” result is still on the first page.

    • Evehn@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      63·
      6 months ago

      Just letting you know kagi has a family plan with unlimited searches, so you can probably split it with family or friends! I have yet to see how searxng search holds up to kagi.

    • Shellbeach@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      I jumped back on ecosia. It’s nice there, but I’m sure there are issues that a non tech person like me may not know about

        • Twig@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          It is. That or it was very coincidentally down for the exact amount of time as DDG.

    • Facebones@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      I run a searxng instance on my pi server, use it from all of my devices, honestly forget its a thing running from my office 99% of the time until I’m rebooting the pi for one reason or another and spend more seconds than I’d like to admit wondering why I can’t run a search 🤣😅

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Was this news to you? Other than Google and Bing there aren’t any other significant alternatives. Even brave is a bit limited.

    • sugartits@lemmy.worldEnglish
      68·
      6 months ago

      Just pay the extra for unlimited searches. It’s not much money, especially if it’s a tool for work.

      • Jarix@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23·
        6 months ago

        Listen sugartits, some of us don’t have much money. So if it’s not much money we still don’t have it

        (Mostly i just wanted to point out your username by using it in a comment)

        • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          111·
          6 months ago

          That was one of the most out of the blue comments I have ever read. It sounded so… unreal. Something out of a sitcom. Then I read “sugartits” is the name of the lemmy you were replying to. That’s was really top mark. Kudos for you.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        It’s a hobby as it is.

        If I ever manage to sell enough copies of it to be able to pay for a Kagi subscription, I’ll do it and make it public knowledge.

    • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      731·
      6 months ago

      Brave search is independent. It was trained with google search but now it’s a thing of its own and doesn’t rely on google. I switched from DuckDuckGo a year ago and haven’t looked back

      • mholiv@lemmy.worldEnglish
        344·
        6 months ago

        Brave search is run by crypto bros. I’d rather use Kagi or DDG or even Google.

        • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          910·
          6 months ago

          I would use Kagi if it was free. It might be run by crypto bros but doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. Google and bing own 99% of the search engine market. Competition that doesn’t rely on those two is always good

          • tranceFusion@lemm.eeEnglish
            20·
            6 months ago

            Well they were dishonest about the product behavior in multiple cases, such as adding referral links to search results. That makes it a bad product.

            • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              41·
              6 months ago

              Personally I don’t want to support Microsoft bing either. This website you shared doesn’t lump together all the bing using search engines (DuckDuckGo and yahoo). How is supporting Microsoft a wayyy better choice. This isn’t some pump and dump scheme. Your criticism should be of the company (they added referall links to their browser and the owner has some nasty political takes on top of running another privacy invasive company).

              • mholiv@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                6 months ago

                It does not matter if it lumps them together or not. Google still has 90% and they’re not Bing. Yandax another ~3% and they’re not Bing. That means at max Bing is 7% if you combine the rest. 3.5% vs 7% does not change the root of my argument.

                Those points you make against Brave are valid though. I just run into too many people who are in the Brave cult and it’s concerning.