It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.

Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.

If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?

EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.

      • TheMinions@lemmy.world
        35·
        10 months ago

        I know nothing about Kagi, except that it requires an account and is paid. So I assume all searches are tied to that account and there is no way to do an anonymous search.

        Disregard I’m a fool

        • Rexios@lemm.ee
          96·
          10 months ago

          We care about data protection: We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We do not log or associate searches with an account. More at our privacy policy.

          Literally the first paragraph on their website

          • cll7793@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            151·
            10 months ago

            The Patriot Act and Snowden’s leaks have shown companies will go against their privacy policy to appease governments. Search engines especially are targeted by five eyes with the PRISM program where copies of all your data, linked to your payment, are sent to Five Eyes and stored. Gag orders and legal threats prevent disclosure, as has been done with prior tech companies who have tried to push back against this.

            Be wary of trusting corporations with your data as monetization is a powerful incentive.

              • kautau@lemmy.world
                2·
                10 months ago

                With lemmy you are trusting whatever instance your account is on, and really any federated instances since they could choose to hold onto your posts and comments

          • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
            74·
            10 months ago

            I don’t know if I believe that. It’s a paid service, so the only way to enforce that unpaid users cannot search is to take a search request and check if it is coming from your account. Same with basic things like rate limiting requests. You literally need to associate your requests to an account to make basic functionality like this work.

            If they do this but just don’t log it, then that means there is no way for their devs to ever debug issues users have or to monitor their services. I’m highly skeptical.

            Also, “trust us” is something I’ve heard too many times.

            • random8847@lemmy.world
              9·
              10 months ago

              It’s a paid service, so the only way to enforce that unpaid users cannot search is to take a search request and check if it is coming from your account

              That’s not the same as logging.

              You literally need to associate your requests to an account to make basic functionality like this work.

              They just need to check the session of the user on the fly during the search operation. Once the search is done they don’t need to persist any record linking the search and the user.

            • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyz
              5·
              10 months ago

              They don’t need to tie the searches to an account. They log them anonymously. From their privacy policy:

              Absent from our logs are any identifying information about your client. As such, any query or traffic logging that we do cannot be tied back to your account, ensuring that Kagi developers are the only people that the logs will ever be useful to.

          • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
            97·
            10 months ago

            and am I supposed to believe such a bold claim? the only reason they give is “trust me, bro. I pinky promise I’m not logging anything”.

            You have one account, every search query you make is associated with that account. And even if they aren’t selling that ultra sensitive data, I’m sure they are keeping logs to prevent abuse and fix bugs which could be used when a third party gains access to their servers (malicious actors, law enforcement, etc).

            And that’s assuming that Kagi is not mining and or selling any data themselves, which is a bold assumption given how little we know about their proprietary product. If at least they published the source code, but no. I’m supposed to trust a proprietary black box which could potentially be linking every search query back to me.

      • dwalin@lemmy.world
        112·
        10 months ago

        Not op, nor i have any experience with kagi, but i suspect there is no way to do an Anonymous search with kagi.

      • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
        73·
        10 months ago

        copypasting the other comment I made in this thread:

        and am I supposed to believe such a bold claim? the only reason they give is “trust me, bro. I pinky promise I’m not logging anything”.

        You have one account, every search query you make is associated with that account. And even if they aren’t selling that ultra sensitive data, I’m sure they are keeping logs to prevent abuse and fix bugs which could be used when a third party gains access to their servers (malicious actors, law enforcement, etc).

        And that’s assuming that Kagi is not mining and or selling any data themselves, which is a bold assumption given how little we know about their proprietary product. If at least they published the source code, but no. I’m supposed to trust a proprietary black box which could potentially be linking every search query back to me.

        • DeadlineX@lemm.ee
          1·
          10 months ago

          I don’t have any skin in this game. I just wanted to point out that you went from “given how privacy invasive this particular entity is”

          To

          “… assuming… how little we know… could potentially”

          That’s a pretty big leap from a bold and confident assertion that an entity is doing something all the way to saying that entity maybe could be doing something but we don’t know. It’s just a weird logical leap to me, and I felt compelled to mention it.