capsule/gemlog/a-comprehensive-evaluation-of-various-search-engines-i-ve-used.gmi

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.

=> https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ 1: deliberately worse

- 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[1] and related scammy behavior[2], and the CEO is kind of a jerk[3]. Hard pass.

=> https://fossforce.com/2023/01/brave-a-great-browser-with-a-questionable-business-model/ 1: built on crypto
=> https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-users-through-affiliate-links 2: related scammy behavior
=> https://web.archive.org/web/20240504031305/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-eich-covid-19.html 3: CEO is kind of a jerk

- 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.

=> https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html 1: concerns about the CEO's character and the company's lack of focus

- 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[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.

=> https://github.com/StractOrg/stract 1: open source

- 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**.

=> https://blog.jbowdre.lol/post/self-hosting-a-search-engine-iyjdlk6y 1: self-hosting

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

=> https://blog.jbowdre.lol/post/a-comprehensive-evaluation-of-various-search-engines-i-ve-used 📡 Originally posted on jbowdre's weblog