Call me old fashioned, but when I want to find out about something my first instinct is *not* to chat with a computer. I'm not interested in a conversational back-and-forth or a probably-at-least-partially-incorrect summary, I just want to find the authoritative resources that can tell me about a thing. So I use a search engine, and I've used a lot of different search engines over the past ~5 years or so.
Given that the world has just been recently reminded that so many of those "alternative" search engines are literally just Bing[1], I thought it might be time to throw together a complete list of the search engines which are out there. *(As with everything I write, this is a comprehensive and factual listing, and any omissions are deliberate and not because I'm lazy or not actually thorough in my evaluations.)*
=> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-outage-affects-bing-copilot-duckduckgo-and-chatgpt-internet-search/ 1: "alternative" search engines are literally just Bing
- Google. Used to be the default way to find stuff, then they started making the results deliberately worse[1], then they started shoving AI into every orifice. Hard pass.
- Bing. Used to be garbage, then started to get a little better (as Google results were getting a little worse), then they started shoving AI into every orifice. Hard pass.
- Brave. Has its own crawler/index, and supplements the results with queries from Bingle - oh and the company's business model is built on crypto[1] and related scammy behavior[2], and the CEO is kind of a jerk[3]. Hard pass.
- Kagi. Own index, plus results from Bingle. Subscription-based business model, and honestly great results... but I've stopped using Kagi over concerns about the CEO's character and the company's lack of focus[1]. Meh.
- Perplexity. Basically Bing + AI wrapped with a slightly better chat interface, and nice inline references for the summaries. This is my go-to for when I want to ask questions for a topic, but isn't really useful for finding authoritative sources (documentation) directly.
- Stract. The currently-most-interesting search project in the world. It's fully independent and open source[1], and offers a lot of control over how it works... but the results are kind of underwhelming. I want this to succeed, but I can't use it for regular search tasks.
- SearXNG. A metasearch engine which pulls from every other search engine, and gives you knobs to toggle each source to fine-tune the results. It doesn't have its own index or crawler, but offers good-enough results without having to rely on any one (or two) provider(s). Also, I'm a sucker for self-hosting[1]. **This is my current default, at least until Stract gets better**.
If you think my evaluation wasn't comprehensive, thorough, or objective enough, you might be happier with this more excellent comparison of search engines with their own indexes[1].
=> https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ 1: more excellent comparison of search engines with their own indexes
