I use Kagi. Paying for a search engine isn't something that I ever saw myself doing, but I do honestly believe it's the only way they can exist that means the users are the customers instead of the product.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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Second for Kagi
Not only solving the customer vs product problem. It really does have a number of great customizable features that easily make it the best.
Also can be purchased via crypto for maximum privacy. They also offer something I eould call "AI Studio", where you can easily switch models, and the chats are fully private and don't share context. You can customize which domains to promote, demote, block, pin, and they have some nice bangs functionality.
I stopped paying for all streaming platforms, and Kagi is hands down the best bang for my buck as I already use it every day (in contrast of binging a show every two months).
Yeah, I meant to say in the post but forgot... I'm currently housing insecure, food insecure, etc... so I'm looking for a non-Kagi solution. But it's definitely on my radar to try when I do have $ to spare.
Sign up and you get 100 searches for free, plus unlimited !bangs. Worth making an account for when you can't find what you're looking for on the others.
Just try Kagi and you'll never look back.
I forgot to include in the post that I'm too broke for Kagi, otherwise I'd have tried it already :(
Last time I checked Kagi didn’t have an option for people who just do a few searches a month so it ended being too expensive for me.
I might have to check again though😇
I also use Kagi. It has the option for AI but doesn't shove it down your throat like other providers.
One feature I especially appreciate from Kagi are URL redirects. I can have it automatically replace parts of the URL from any search result. For example, I have YouTube results redirect to Invidious, and Reddit redirect to redlib, without me having to replace the domain myself
How are you doing this? I can't get it to work. ^https://www.youtube.com/|https://www.invidious.io/ doesnt work for me and I can't find what to put in for redlib
invidious.io isn't actually an instance of invidious. If you replace your rule with "^https://www.youtube.com/|https://inv.nadeko.net/" (or any other instance: https://docs.invidious.io/instances/), then it should work. For Redlib, I replace www.reddit.com with reddit.nerdvpn.de (although reddit often blocks redlib instances from being able to access their content).
An easy way to see if services can be redirected like this is to open a link (such as a video on youtube.com) in your browser and replace it with another domain. If it pulls up the correct content on the new domain, then such a rule can work.
Neat. I'll take a look and see how it works. Thanks
currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results
This is one of the killer features for me in Kagi. The ability to buff or debuff websites in the results. Whenever I encounter an AI slopsite, I immediately block it in Kagi and it'll never show up again. Other websites are annoying, but occasionally return good results, so I'll just debuff them in the search results.
Arch Linux forums? Guix mailing list? Max buff!
That being said, I do wish there was a more open source friendly alternative or a search engine that didn't just rebrand Bing or Google results. Maybe SearXNG or Mojeek?
That feature of Kagi is so awesome and I wish other search engines would implement it.
For Lemmy, I guess 22 comments counts as a mega thread.
searxng :)
I'm gonna comment on my personal experience with a few search engines.
- Startpage I stopped using because, and it took me a while to notice this, the searches aren't included in the URL. This means if I want to bookmark a startpage search for later or find a startpage search in my browser history I can't. This is a dealbreaker for me.
- Qwant didn't have advanced search tools of any kind, and it also didn't work in Singapore (where I occasionally set my VPN to).
- Mojeek ... is not ready yet.
- Kagi I tried for a bit but I'm not paying a subscription to an American company for search.
Ultimately I ended back up on ~~Duckduckgo~~ Startpage. I think perhaps we should go back to web directories instead of search engines.
- https://www.startpage.com/do/settings
- Privacy and Safety
- HTTP request method > GET
still a ddg user myself but theres how you solve your startpage problem
Oh thank you. Now I don't need to use an American search engine.
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4get https://git.lolcat.ca/lolcat/4get https://4get.ca/instances
lots of public instances which tend to be very stable + it's extremely easy to self host. in my experience it's significantly better than every other proxy search engine
I grew tired of all of them and I’m using mullvad leta. Too bad they don’t support images but it’s the only one without ai. It’s not perfect and it crashes if you use “site:” but so far it’s working for me better than the others.
Interesting, I'd never even heard of that one!
I have my own SearXNG self hosted Instance but I'm probably going to switch it to 4get today. I've just noticed it getting worse and worse over time. slow, bad results, or just randomly starts 504ing when everything else (forgejo, vaultwarden, navidrome, jellyfin, Akkoma, etc) on my server continues to work fight.
Tried some 4get instances and it's just so damn snappy and quick.
I noticed the same bad search issue a few weeks ago. I tried several other instances from searx.space and they all gave bad results. I reverted to DDG. I'll have to give 4get a shot.
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Yandex is deptessingly good
Oh hmm... their image search is second to none but it never really crossed my mind to try the regular search, I'm not even sure why.
I switched to using Ecosia a while back, and have had no problems with it. The results are generally relevant enough for everyday use, and it feels good knowing that my searches contribute (at least in some small way) to reforestation projects.
It’s not perfect, of course.. It still relies partly on bing’s index, but the experience has been stable and consistent for me. I also like that the interface is clean and privacy-focused without trying to upsell the search experience.
In the past I’ve tried alternatives like StartPage and DuckDuckGo, but Ecosia has quietly become my default. It just works well enough without much fuss, and that’s something I really appreciate right now.
Rooting for ecosia with it plans to create their own index, but unhappy with the direction they're gping specially with AI
I feel the same way. I’d love to see them move toward developing their own independent index. I also really hope they stay true to what makes them different and don’t get caught up in the whole “AI-everything” trend. Search doesn’t need to be artificially padded or reworded by a chatbot, it just needs to be genuinely useful, transparent, and connected to reality. If Ecosia focused entirely on building a clean, human-centered search experience powered by their own index, without the AI noise, I think that would be far more valuable than following the same path other major engines have taken....
i am using DuckDuckGo ? am i doing something wrong lol
most things i personally search for i have to append reddit anyway, since otherwise it feels like ai generated content anyway
Here is a list of alternative (meta-)search engines:
Swisscow
Qwant
Ecosia
DuckDuckGo
SearXNG
MetaGer
Leta by Mullvad
Mojeek
Kagi (Paid I think)
Das all I can remember rn.
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I don't think Qwant and Ecosia's index has fully rolled out. They have been using it as a partial index in France and Germany starting in summer 2025 according to their FAQs on their website. So I guess it would depend where you live.
Just going to give Wiby a shoutout because no-one else has. More for curiosity / surfing than research, but you definitely get unique results.
I like DDG but it just uses bing under the hood.
I actually prefer Brave. (Though brave has been caught fiddling the results)
They all kind of suck in their own way. Brave or DDG gets the job done 99%nof the time.
I selfhost searxng. It's good enough even if it's just a meta-search (but at least removes AI generated answers).
I've looked at yacy (https://yacy.net/) some time ago. Nice concept but I had technical limitations at my side to properly peer with others. Maybe I'll try again as I resolved them.
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I’ve tried all alternatives to google and I like Qwant the most so far
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