4.2 KiB
| title | published | updated |
|---|---|---|
| A Comprehensive Evaluation of Various Search Engines I've Used | 2024-05-23T14:42:41.000000Z | 2024-05-23T14:42:41.000000Z |
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, 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.)
- Google. Used to be the default way to find stuff, then they started making the results deliberately worse, 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.
- DuckDuckGo. It's Bing in a trenchcoat, but private. Meh.
- Ecosia. It's Bing in a trenchcoat, but plants trees? Meh.
- Startpage. Bingle + Google (Bingle), but private. Meh.
- 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 and related scammy behavior, and the CEO is kind of a jerk. 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. Meh.
- You.com. Basically Bing + AI wrapped with a dumb chat interface. Pass.
- 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, 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. 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.
=> https://blog.jbowdre.lol/post/a-comprehensive-evaluation-of-various-search-engines-i-ve-used 📡 Originally posted on jbowdre's weblog