SEO has made it incredibly hard to find answers without getting spammed by news and blog sites. Places like ask Lemmy help democratize answers through upvotes and downvotes so the quality is higher.
Do you know of any hidden gems for search engines or Q&A sites that contain highly relevant answers without much noise?
Reddit, believe it or not.
Search engine plus Reddit, believe it or not.
FTFY.
This is the only reason I still use reddit, hopefully some day there’s a better alternative.
In areas where I have expertise, reddit has shown itself to be incredibly uninformed. The stupidest answer usually receives the not upvotes. I would not trust a single answer from that site.
But only if you’re logged in with res, darkmode, Java script enabled, ad blocker turned off, recent credit card info …
Site:somesite.com queries can help.
I started using Kagi a while back. It’s a paid search engine but is pretty solid
Kagi looks interesting, i was hoping someone would move into the market to try to make a real search engine again
That is wild! I can’t believe they made us have to pay for information now.
they always did, with google you paid with your privacy and attention to ads. in the pre-google days you paid your ISP and/or aol
But now we have to pay all 3 ways lol. I love the idea though. I’ve already signed up!
Read their privacy policy, you’re paying two ways, same as it ever was. Kagi doesn’t have ads, doesn’t log searches, doesn’t sell data, and on its privacy policy page it lists out every cookie it uses, what’s stored in it, and what it’s used for, you can literally check your browser against it.
Consumer reports.org
A search engine both indexes the internet then curates “relevance”.
- Mostly if I am looking for info, I’ll go to Wikipedia or lemmy.
- If I am looking for info about a purchase, consumer reports,
- if I am looking for social media, lemmy.
It’s a paid service, but in the UK, which.co.uk is absolutely priceless
Kagi
Kagi surfaces the best results for me for sure. Usually the first link is so good I don’t even need its “Quick Answer” AI
I’m using it now!
Perplexity.ai has largely replaced Google and Bing for me. It searches the Internet (including reddit), asks for clarification if necessary, then summarises it all with sources cited. The free tier currently gives 5x gpt4 copilot searches per rolling 4 hours. Like most ai chat, it’s less of a search engine, and more an ‘answer’ engine.
As for q and a, reddit, though you’ll have to filter the funny / misleading comments out. Quora is just weird, I don’t like the vibe there.
Chatgpt or Bing+gpt tbh
I don’t think ChatGPT fits there, sometimes it just gives you some good practice or very general answers that won’t be specific for your current setup (being an OS, or ROM or whatever).
ChatGPT is my go to now for any question as long as it’s not about current events. 99% of my questions are like “how do I …”
The chatgpt answers don’t cut it for me, these companies all made this fucking problem in the first place and now they want us to buy their tech-hype bullshit to fix it. Fuck them, same thing that caused Reddit to do what it’s done.
Startpage.com I am trying (again). I prefer the Google results without the privacy hit.
I’ve been using Qwant and am happy with it.
I’m self hosting searXNG and it’s the best search I’ve used. Will have to give the gpt bots a try from the looks of this thread
I get a lot from searXNG. It’s gotten a lot better from when I tried it out years ago. Mojeek is getting better, as well.
I personally use brave search, it has worked very well in the 6ish months I’ve used it. Not only for privacy but the results are solid and I’ve noticed improvements from feedback in the community. If it has enough data it does have an AI generated summary as well which I’ve found to be very useful for precise questions.
I’m using metager and I’m quite satisfied with it. https://metager.org/
It’s a meta search engine run by a nonprofit. If you want to know more: https://metager.org/about
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