I'm trying https://kagi.com/ at the moment, was mentioned here a few months back when it was still in beta and I finally remembered to switch one of my browsers to try it.

So far, pretty happy with it. Before that I'd been using ddg but found myself so frequently !g that it was almost pointless.

DDG feels absolutely rubbish at local searches, but I may have just lost patience with it.

To be honest, I don't think DDG has a future purely because of the name. No way I'm telling non-techy friends that as I'll just get "what? Ducky go? Duck what? Are you being serious or is this a joke?"

Being able to make rank adjustments is an absolute GAME CHANGER. I didn't realise just how terrible my search results were until I could have granular control over the poor quality sites which kept appearing in my Google results. It's so clear to me now that Google is prioritising advertising heavily over user experience. The recent discussion about how such a large number of Google searches include "reddit" should serve as a warning for Google to swing that pendulum back in the direction of the user experience, or they will lose people like me. I'll be paying for Kagi when it's out of beta.

>To be honest, I don't think DDG has a future purely because of the name. No way I'm telling non-techy friends that as I'll just get "what? Ducky go? Duck what? Are you being serious or is this a joke?"

Only as a side note/JFYI, naming something, particularly if aimed to be international/multilingual, is particularly tricky, duckduckgo may well sound funny to your friends, but - as an example - kagi (in Italy) would be pronounced the same as "cagi" which is a reknown historical maker of men underwear, to the point that "a cagi" is sometimes used as a synonym to "a tank top", and surely it would make some people think it as a joke.

Or worse, it could be pronounced as "Caghi" ("you shit").

To solve the mystery, Kagi is pronounced kah-gee (and is Japanese for "key")

I’m delighted with Kagi. It finds the regulars I want (StackOverflow, Github, Wikipedia) just as well as Google, but is less infested with SEO spam and has a better selection of indie sites. Images and maps aren’t really up to par yet, but I mostly use OSM for maps anyway. I’ll be very happy to pay $10-$15 a month when Kagi start charging.

Anything that says sign up for beta to get me to provide an email and contact info, I and a lot of other people are not going to use.

It's a beta now but it'll become a paid search. That you aren't willing to pay for search means it isn't very important to you.

> That you aren't willing to pay for search means it isn't very important to you.

Or that they don't have money to throw away on things that aren't things necessary to live. Your statement is only true if the person you respond to is quite wealthy, which is a leap.

The target audience is professionals, where search helps them make money, which is necessary to live.

I don’t know where you live or what your circumstances are, but $10-15/month is less than Netflix or Spotify. It’s less than YouTube Premium. All those things are essentially you paying for content in a way that results in you being less advertised to. It’s not a lot of money.

Wait, why is being 'quite wealthy' necessary? Their FAQ says 10$ on the low end, 20-30$ for an unlimited offering. People of varying economic positions spend that monthly on a myriad of non-essential services. I feel like you're also playing a semantic game with 'importance' since in another comment you immediately jump to a starving person trying to choose between a premium search engine and food. We're more or less in a typical HN thread about product barrier to entry here and it feels like you're on a class crusade to get equal search results for all. Not the same conversation.

Totally fair, but why not just provide a throwaway email if you're worried about spam or privacy? Is it the principle? I've never had a principle problem with having a login to a service. I would do so with DDG, for example, if I could customise my results better.

I am thoroughly sick of registering and logging in for services and will avoid doing so whenever possible.

When it comes to these older sites, it's hard for an automated engine to discover what they're about because (1) they lack the kind of structured description that's far more common on modern sites - including, to some limited extent, spammy ones (although extensive structured descriptions would nonetheless tend to favor legitimate content) - and that powers "smart" suggestions in search results. Also, (2) the web directories that would've provided an accurate description back when those sites were current are now dead. What we'd need to improve the Web search ecosystem is for "non-commercial", hobbyist sites to work on addressing both of these problems.

HTML has had metadata tags for ever, it's just that they quickly stopped being used by search engines were so inaccurate and prone to abuse. Even now, the heavy presence of these types of tags is arguably a marker that a website is really interested in its google ranking, and probably fairly spammy.

Any sort of description or tagging or keywords or genre description needs third party vetting to be of any use what so ever. It's simply too profitable to misrepresent your websites for it to be any other way.

Those metadata tags were just a simple textual description and a bunch of keywords with no reference to any controlled vocabulary. This is what made them so easy to abuse. Modern schema-based structured data is vastly different, and with a bit of human supervision (that's the "third party vetting") it's feasible to tell when the site is lying. (Of course, low-quality bulk content can also be given an accurate description. But this is good for users, who can then more easily filter out that sort of content.)

One could even let this vetting happen in decentralized fashion, by extending Web Annotation standards to allow for claims of the sort "this page/site includes accurate/inaccurate structured content."

The thing is "a bit of human supervision" is difficult on a scale of ten thousand Wikipedias. It pretty much needs to be done completely automatically.

I just hope we can get a trust-based network combined with search. So if I trust some friends and search "best toaster", and one of my trusted friends has given a very high review score to a toaster, then I get that one as the top search result.

Extend this to online communities, and you can ask "what laptop would HN recommend for Linux?", etc.

Of course, there's a privacy issue to solve, but the functionality could be very useful compared to the crappy Google search results for commercial products.

I'm having similar idea but with less user involve: a browser extension that extract keywords from the websites you actually visited, and form a p2p database with your followers. If you see spam / undesired ads in search result, you can rate down the content, and the system auto reduce the weighing from the peer providing that history.

To avoid sharing sensitive page / habit, maybe let the user review in batch and confirm before sharing out the list.

>But these alternative search engines kinda just remind me of why people started using Google. When I use them, I don't get spam

In the past few months at least half of my Google searches have had spam in the top 3 results. Literally malware domains that community-made filter lists are aware of but somehow Google chooses to share anyway.

Yes! I was trying to find an article on polish objections to Nord Stream 2 a week or two ago and couldn't find anything. Tried a million search combinations, tried date restricting but it all favotrd recency. Ended up finding it as a footnote on Wikipedia

With marginalia I think that is by design. They intentionally do not index any websites that are deemed "too modern", which includes most things one might be searching for. It does seem to be intended more for exploring unusual places.