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.
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
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).
Kagi
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.
I’ve been using Qwant and am happy with it.
Startpage.com I am trying (again). I prefer the Google results without the privacy hit.
Removed by mod
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.
