I’ve seen a lot of discourse over which browsers we use and I myself have made the switch from brave to firefox. I still use brave as my search engine though, so… which do yall recommend? Is brave’s engine necessarily bad to use? I personally like its ui/theme.
I have switched many times over the years and nothing has ever come close to google search. However, due to the recent massive decline in google search quality I am trying out kagi, with actually great success. I am still debating if I should pay for access once my trial ends, but more for budget reasons than for quality reasons. If it were free, I would not hesitate to switch.
I’ve been paying for Kagi for a couple months now. Now that it’s $10 for unlimited searches I’ll probably keep it up for a while. I do tend to get really good results. Its the first thing on the chopping block next time I need to tighten my budget though.
Before Kagi I was using DDG, but had to use bangs a lot because I couldn’t surface what I was looking for.
I’m liking all the comments saying that [even despite its strong decline in quality], Google’s results are still much better than others’. I’ve been moving around a lot to other search engines lately and thought I’ve been doing something wrong.
Better to De-Google sooner rather than later imho and it’s fairly safe to assume corporate greed will continue to send it’s products and services deeper into the abyss. I think using alternatives now will make life easier in the future as Google becomes less useful with each passing day. Also, just using Google gives them access to personal data to harvest and ad revenue. I think we should try to be conscientious consumers whenever possible and use less evil alternatives. I don’t want to support Google’s enshitification of the Internet, censorship, anti-competitive practices, etc…
Similar for me, there’s just absolutely no comparison to Google so far. DDG is the closest but the results are still a fair bit worse and importantly, I’ll always have to swap to Google for maps anyways as Apple Maps is just an insult to users.
Kagi is pretty expensive for my country’s standards, sadly
I have been using duckduckgo. I personally think it’s pretty good. So much so, that I think I have used it for 10 years now.
Browser: Firefox because I can download its source code, use it, inspect, modify and share. All of these 4 freedoms make Firefox free, as in freedom.
Brave is non-free (closed source and not contributing to software freedom).I use Qwant (unfortunately, it only works in the EU) and site-local search (Wikipedia, ArchWiki, etc.)
All web search engines are crap, honestly. Maybe Kagi makes better, idk.
EDIT: Brave is free, apparently.
Qwant works just fine in the US
Could you please elaborate why Brave isn’t open source? The source code is on github and there’s even an Brave-Git package in the AUR.
Ok, it seems I’ve been wrong. Apologies.
SearXNG. It’ll search all the other engines for you, in a privacy preserving way.
Caveat that it is only privacy preserving if you trust whoever is hosting it.
I use startpage which is a google proxy. So, it does what duckduckgo does with bing but with google instead. Searx is also a great option. Neither have their own crawler though
As for the brave engine there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. In fact, I’d argue it’s much safer than google, bing, or the proxies of each. While proxying you can still be fingerprinted. With brave only brave could do that and I trust them not to more than most.
You should be cautious though, as brave has had some privacy issues before injecting affiliate links which would track you when going to ecommerce sites.
Of course, the brave CEO is a piece of shit though. Full on covid conspiracy lab made Fauci plandemic ivermectin type stuff, believes that gay marriage should be illegal while donating to anti-gay orgs, and otherwise uses his position to further far right ideas. He also tries to fund weird micro nation projects with the goal of creating anarcho-capitalist heavens in the ocean. Think bioshock, but crypto bro. All around weird guy
All this said, I’d still argue from a privacy perspective brave is a perfectly reasonable option. The company has one privacy controversy but that’s better than the big two. I’ll stick to startpage though for political reasons, until I find something with good enough results that’s fully independent and moral. Currently looking at mojeek myself
Currently looking at mojeek myself
How’d you find us?
Oh shit, hey! Been a bit since I’ve said this but I’m happy to answer. I’ll admit I don’t remember exactly where, but I had asked about a privacy respecting independant search engine in a few matrix chats and separately did a bit of searching on startpage. It’s likely one of those two places I first found it but word of mouth through matrix is what convinced me to use it
I’ve been liking the service btw, I think you guys are doing something fantastic
thank you kindly, that is great to hear; we’ve got this new and even better (so far testing is showing that) algo ready to go too: https://www.mojeek.com/eval so hopefully it’ll be even more fantastic-er soon :D
Of course, the brave guy CEO is a piece of shit though. Full on covid conspiracy lab made Fauci pandemic ivermectin type stuff, believes that gay marriage should be illegal while donating to anti-gay orgs, and otherwise uses his position to further far right ideas. He also tries to fund weird micro nation projects with the goal of creating anarcho-capitalist heavens in the ocean. Think bioshock, but crypto bro. All around weird guy
Brendan Eich is a co-founder of Mozilla. So if you’re not going to use Brave because of him. How can you use Firefox?
Eich resigned Mozilla and started Brave over pressure from Mozilla because of his opposition to same sex marriage, and financial support to anti-same sex marriage intiatives.
I know, but he’s still a co-founder.
And Mozilla basically kicked him out for his political beliefs, so how is that a reason not to use Mozilla software today?
Does he profit off of Mozilla (which said profit is going to right-wing causes)?
Maybe. We don’t know about the exit deal he got.
Okay, maybe a not-for-profit organization that he voluntarily resigned from gave him a golden parachute deal with perpetual royalties that’s totally secret. We can never know …
One thing we do know? Using Brave has a 100% chance of supporting him financially.
I’m not, not directly. I’m using the mullvad browser. However, even if I was using firefox that is part of a not-for-profit organization that he is no-longer part of where the money and success do not benefit him. This is different than using a browser whose success gives him money, which he then uses to support causes I am vehemently against.
If using brave did not support him I would accept an argument around my usage of it. It does however.
Apologies for the fact that you’re getting downvoted, that is a reasonable question to ask
Kagi is great
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a while now, and while it works great for searches in English, I’ve had some problems with my native language (Finnish). However, with the use of bangs, this downside can be mitigated.
It was an great moment when I learned that bangs exist. I only use two or three but it’s still amazing.
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What? What have I missed?
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Any love for qwant?
Askjeeves
Excite!
They’re just repackaging AltaVista results.
Nice reference.
I’m another Kagi fan - after customising it a little it’s just so good, and I haven’t even played with features like lenses.
I really like the custom bang searches (e.g. I could make
!ks gravitysearch on simple Wikipedia), especially on mobile since Firefox Android doesn’t support the normal browser quicksearches (where you set a keyword for each search).deleted by creator
For any given query, if you’re not satisfied with the first results out of one search engine, try two competing ones. Next time you have a search, begin with whatever one did the best on your previous search. Iterate. Record and publish your results.
Folks were unsatisfied with AltaVista and Lycos; that’s how Google won for a while. At one point, Yahoo stood for “You Always Have Other Options”. You still do.
For work I still use Google tbh. It’s still really good for technical answers
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