Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn’t a clear solution to navigating the web because it’s either ai slop or the results are poor.

And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you’re looking for.

And so I told them I’d compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.

So far I have:

Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.

Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik

Ecosia: works great but relies on bing

I have tried things like qwant ect but haven’t really settled on those.

Any other suggestions?

I’d tell em to use udm14 but it’s still google so I’d rather keep that as a plan B.

OQB @FreddiesLantern@leminal.space

  • jcarr@programming.dev
    3·
    2 days ago

    I always use DuckDuckGo. It’s usually adequate, and certainly “the best of a bad lot”, if you want to look at it that way. I sometimes use bangs if I want to search directly on a site. For example, sometimes I’ll search for something like a code tutorial video directly from DuckDuckGo, and if I have trouble finding it, I’ll update my search to go directly to YouTube, e.g., “modern perl features” first, then “modern perl features !yt”.

    I used to jump over to Google when I couldn’t find something through DuckDuckGo, but it’s such garbage now, I don’t even try. I haven’t used Google for months.