Is there any good search engines? I mean I’ve tried searching recently for a solution I referenced 3 months ago and it’s disappeared from Google and Bing.
Shit, even looking up repair information for a household appliance if can’t find the model before the newest and it all points to a sale page for the newest version.
Maybe AkJeeves!?
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now, and I never went back to Google. Maybe give it a try !
I use duck duck go but sometimes I just have to use google.
Use same search terms etc and can’t get what I want.
You should try DDG’s “bangs” then. They are shortcuts you can type to narrow your search or use another search engine from DDG’s interface.
!gm Singapore will search for Singapore directly in Google Maps
!w Singapore will search for the word in Wikipedia
!g will search in Google, etc.
Ohh I love that, I always have to resort to google maps to search specific things now I will try that.
Thanks so much
deleted by creator
kagi
Mozilla recently announced some kind of partnership with Qwant. Hadn’t heard of it before, and I was highly skeptical (I’m a very cynical person). I tried it out and honestly I think it gives me on-average better results than Google and Bing does. Since it doesn’t track you it doesn’t personalise the results at all, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t have any ads, though I do use an adblocker so don’t quote me on that. It’s also very snappy. Bing often has long loading times for me, which was incredibly frustrating.
Fact: 90% of science is made with quartz
… accurate
My favourite mineral - potato.
scholar.google.com is where you want to go.
Also, in my Google-fu experience technical terms work well for finding better scholarly results.
Same experience I have had. Swapping to scholar gets me relevant results that aren’t filled with ai gibberish and backwater Hokum. Still have to be careful about study sizes and sigma values and applicability, but miles ahead for at least getting to that being my issue.
I still remember trying to find the space group for Copper Telluride. No amount of technical terms could help me there.
P6/mmm?
Iirc, yed
Putting scientific in the search criteria should redirect there then.
At the very least, it might be nice if they ask you if you want to go there instead.
On the other hand, I’m just happy that Google Scholar hasn’t gotten completely destroyed by SEO yet.
Bro, the works cited is the SEO.
For those looking for some Google alternatives:
- Qwant has a custom indexing strategy and is okay
- Brave Search ~uses Google and Bing~ EDIT: they use a custom index too
- Startpage uses Google and Bing and it’s prettier than Brave IMO
- SearX is ugly but has a lot of sources
- Perplexity AI tracks the shit out of you but it’s decent
- Kagi is customizable but it costs you
Feel free to add on any I missed or opinions on these; I haven’t used any extensively
EDIT: Ecosia for trees and DDG for Bing without ads
Brave uses its own index. It used to be supplemented with results from other engines but I believe they have now phased that out.
Brave is the best of the free options in my experience, and it supports “bangs” which let’s you send your querry to a different engine (typing “how far is it to the sun !g” will pass the search to google. Duckduckgo also supports bangs), this is especially helpful for image searches (!gi for google images) since braves image search sucks dogshit 😅
Quant seemed like the second best free option in my experience. Some people don’t like brave as a company for various reasons, so quant may be a good option for those folks. Its my understanding that Mozilla has worked with quant in some way, which is kinda neat.
Both have their own index making them a sustainable/viable option going forward, where meta search engines that use other engine’s results are at the whim of those they fetch the results from (but may provide better results by piggybacking off a larger successful engine)
Thank you for the corrections! I’ve updated the post. I agree that Brave search had the best results/UX. As you mentioned, I have my own moral qualms with brave as a company.
You’re very welcome, thanks for your initial post laying out a bunch of the options for folks to think about ☺️
Hope you have a good one!
Ecosia uses the money they generate with ads to plant trees 🌿 (I think it’s bing on the backend)
Added! I love the mission
Qwant was good until they georestricted it for no reason
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
Source: https://metager.org/lang
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And has other useful features, for example:
[…] you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.
Source: https://metager.org/tips
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
Brave Search does not use Google and Bing. And why did you skip over DDG?
I’ve updated the post to say that in Brave uses a custom index. I skipped DuckDuckGo because it only uses Bing :(
Don’t forget DuckDuckGo.
Added!
Why not just use Google scholar?
Ever died from smallpox while holding a healing crystal?
Didn’t fucking think so 😎
This scene live rent free in my head. Also fuckin Crystal Healing types make me look bad when I just think pretty rocks look nice
I know right? Completely ruin geology.
I’m not sure what exactly you’re typing into the search field, but I don’t anything like this. The top 3 sites I get for a search of “minerals” are wikipedia, australian museum, and britannica. Typing in “crystals” gets me a healthline article debunking crystal healing, but the following results are some woman’s personal store and amazon. Lastly, being direct about wanting scientific articles gets me said articles…
Side note: Why are there so many people pushing for kagi in this thread and skipping over the fact that duckduckgo exists? It’s kinda bizarre to see.
Hell, typing in “scientific data about minerals” gets me a bunch of university geology department websites.
It looks like OP tried to write $99.99 but got drunk and wrote it backwards
Could be Québécois . They put the dollar sign after the number, rather than before if I recall.
Or from a country that uses a currency that puts their sign afterwards so not that familiar with dollars
It makes sense to put then sign after
We say 99.99 dollars not dollars 99.99
Exactly why i have made the same mistake often also
Their own national standards documents prescribe putting it in front when using English
Aaaaannd this is why I use Kagi. The site ranking feature let’s me block or down rank sketchy sites. (And lets you boost credible sites.)
let’s
HERE COMES THE S!
As a gem and mineral collecting hobbyist I feel this pain so, so much.
God I had this issue looking for used wheels for my car. Like, actual wheels to use for a track day, but results showed nothing but simracing threads for used STEERING wheels.
“scientific data about minerals -crystal -healing” should do it
I’ve tried the exclusion Boolean term with Google before, and it really didn’t work :(
maybe try -“thing”?
Excluding crystal from a search about minerals may eliminate more than you want.
true, that was my first idea, it needs some workshopping
Mullvad Leta?
Duckduckgo lite?
duckduckgo onion?
Brave search?
What are some others?
SerXing?
Startpage?
Several different very privacy friendly browsers have those in them by default.
Ah yes I love the science of rock and rock accessories