google search results are still kind of useful especially for non-english language queries, anyone knows a good alternative?

searxng also doesn’t really seem to work these days…

  • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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    50 minutes ago

    “internet indexer” should really be a government / EU / UN sponsored public utility thing. And then you have front ends that can improve the search query and filter and sort the results.

    I don’t know how much it would cost / how large a data center it would take to cache the web pages like google does. But there is just no reason to have so much wealth / advertising drain from the public for such a fundamental thing.

    • Bluefruit@lemmy.world
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      36 minutes ago

      Agreed. The internet is a utility at this point. Its required for many things included services the government runs already.

    • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayOP
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      3 hours ago

      not a proxy, it directly uses google cse on client side so it’s no better than directly using google

  • Unauthorised User@lemmy.ml
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    12 hours ago

    The modern internet is getting filthier by the day. Gone are the days where independent software used to be a thing I suppose.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      Oh, idk. The entire internet and supporting infrastructure pretty much runs on opensourced software. When you’re talking about a search engine tho, unless you have a data center, a huge pile of cash, and a willingness to part with most of it, search engines are expensive to run.

        • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          They’ll get retooled just like all past, unsuccessful technology. However, I am curious why idle data centers would cause you heartburn. That cycle is not only relegated to realm of internet related technology. That happens throughout all levels.

    • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Hear me out. From day one we all needed to collectively reject any effort to make any profit online. I don’t care if you built something cool, sold furry art or create some neat SAAS. Day one everything should have been stolen and replicated. Everyone should have been terrified of putting anything online out of fear that the monetary value would go to 0 as it was digitally recreated. We wouldn’t be in this situation today with Trump if we stood our ground. We’d have flying cars and world peace

      • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        From day one we all needed to collectively reject any effort to make any profit online.

        WUT? Why?

        We wouldn’t be in this situation today with Trump

        Trump was inevitable and is a product of silly, gullible Americans blown about by political winds without a compass or direction. Americans don’t vote with the long term in mind. For the most part, their future lies within 4 year increments, never really grasping the fact that legislation passed today will be with us for generations if not longer. All you have to do is look at Cannabis laws in this country perpetuated by rich, white, racist, capitalist from 100 years ago.

        We’d have flying cars and world peace

        As someone who has been promised flying cars for 71 years, I don’t think I want the average motorist flying about all willy nilly. We can’t even handle the tarmac ffs…and you want flying cars? World peace? The world doesn’t want peace. There is too much to be had in conflict.

        • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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          38 minutes ago

          WUT? Why?

          Monetization is the root of a majority of our issues. Without monetizing you don’t get data scarcity, profile tracking, Meta, Cambridge analyticals and eventually data that feeds into the current political systems. There is a direct arrow to our current problems that goes from early days of the internet up through the monetization into data scarcity, data collection and all the marketing tools that eventually feed into modern propaganda. Safe guarding against scarcity by creating a hostile internet and culture to monetization would have prevented all of this going on currently. We can’t ever go back to that. We only ever had one chance. New frontiers do not show up every century. Our job was to keep the people who ruined everything else away.

  • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago
    • Yacy
    • SearxNG
    • Degoog!

    Are about the only selfhosted ones I know of. I run SearxNG and have a good deal of success with it. It does bork image searches sometimes and tosses in these lithograph artworks, which are quite interesting to me, but don’t help in the search itself. In as much as it will draw the ire of some, AI makes a pretty good search engine if you are searching for really specific things like: List all Blues artists that were active in 1942 in Memphis. Give resource links.

  • dial_pootis@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    Duckduckgo is surprisingly okay, even with non-english queries by using the region selector (your experience may vary)

    • charade_you_are@sh.itjust.works
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      1 hour ago

      Isn’t it just Bing with privacy? Or do they use their own tweeks or something? It’s what I use nowadays since google never finds anything i search for

  • otterpop@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    This might be one of those things where self hosting isn’t worth the pain, like email.

    I’ve been using Kagi for several years now and have been very happy with it.

    • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
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      14 hours ago

      Nah, fuck Kagi.

      They are literally giving part of your subscription fee to fucking Russia. In comparison, DuckDuckGo have ended their partnership with Yandex. Vlads refusal to follow suit and his steadfast support of Yandex is quite telling to say the least.

      Yet another part of your subscription goes to Elon Musks xAI to support Grok in their AI assistant. Even if you are not using that model, all paying users are effectively subsidizing the cost of the Grok API calls. You can’t opt out of that.

      • beegnyoshi@lemmy.zip
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        11 hours ago

        Man, I used kagi for 2 months or so and stopped subscribing after that because while there wasn’t really anything that I’d seen that’d make me outright unsubscribe there were many things that I found odd and it didn’t make sense to pay so much for a product that I didn’t agree with all that much. For instance:

        I was unable to remove yandex from my search because:

        what makes it difficult to act on this is that Kagi does not save searches as a matter of privacy policy, and including more moving parts would make debugging search quality issues nearly impossible

        Despite having so many AI features that barely fit into a search engine, such as a translator (slop frontend) and an entire browser?

        It called itself “unprofitable” because search is so expensive while giving an honestly insane quota of AI use as far as I can understand (ex. if user pays 10$ for the kagi subscription: 10$ - 20% worth of tokens = 8$ total quota), giving 100 free searches with, as far as I could see, very little protection against burner emails (the translator seems to not need an account at all and it’s an llm frontend, so it shouldn’t be cheap), and it had many different views in many different places from me.

        But all that made me do was hmmm and shrug it off. I mean, we’re different humans from different backgrounds, of course we’d hold different views.

        But holy shit. Hoooooooly shit. That conversation about the GDPR in the article. What the fuck. What in the actual fuck did I just read there. The fact that the CEO emailed him an explanation despite him explicitly asking to not be emailed too. Bruh.

      • Sims@lemmy.ml
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        13 hours ago

        You should look into why so many people isn’t angry at Russia and are now blaming US. Your anger is exactly how US manufactures consent for all their wars, and it keeps you from discovering why people doesn’t hate Russia and even blame US/the west for starting it. They simply create a lynchmob - an echo-chamber - where people won’t listen to counter points bco anger. It works.

        ALL US moral attacks on their ‘enemies’ (Ussr/Russia, N.Korea, China, Iran and oc ALL nations that wont be dictated how to live by the US elite) are such manufactured BS, and it all runs on the anger they create in people, and from there, they can do what they want in the name of ‘war against evil’. It will continue as long as people keep believing US and their controlled information bubble.

        Give it a try, just read all the headlines in this list: What really happened in Ukraine?

        If you couldn’t, or you still refuse the idea of foul play after reading - they got to you…

    • Green Wizard@lemmy.zip
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      14 hours ago

      Searxng has been pretty sweet, been hosting my own for about a year and some change with pretty good results.

      • Dultas@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        I do get blocked by engines occasionally which can have a drastic impact on results.

  • Mwa@thelemmy.club
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    15 hours ago

    I like SearXNG,brave search and mojeek. I understand the controversies with Brave but it’s the only good one I can find.

      • mbirth 🇬🇧@lemmy.ml
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        14 hours ago

        Kagi is still $10+tax a month. That’s $120 a year (plus tax).

        SearXNG is $0 and a few minutes of my time whenever I tweak the configuration.