alt Hacker NewsSearch engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
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Ohi, I'm the author of the open source Searx metasearch engine.
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the same goal when I started Searx development: reduce dependence on online search engines.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore saved content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines. This is a fundamentally different approach than what Searx follows and solves most of the weaknesses of metasearch engines. Of course it has its own weaknesses as well, but most of these are not conceptual and can be resolved by improving the software (and datasets)
I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid relying on external search engines - and even websites listed in results - more and more frequently.
The initial reception is overwhelmingly positive with already more than 30 contributors and hundreds of contributions. Currently it can help with "recall" type searches mainly, but I'm planning to provide pre-indexed thematic datasets and I'm drafting a peer-to-peer index sharing concept. Maybe you can find it useful as well (or at least have some constructive criticism =]).
Links: - https://hister.org/ - https://github.com/asciimoo/hister - Background/motivation/beginnings: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependen... - Small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse.
I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature contains exactly the answer I was looking for, and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it. It’s been a very positive addition.
The funny thing is that as much as everyone complains about AI overviews and Google losing the plot and so on, about a year and a half ago the “where did you hear about us” field on my website stopped being dominated by “Google” and started being dominated by “ChatGPT”.
Normal people are using AI for search more already, Google is just trying to stop their primary business from completely disappearing.
You are the google search engine pre-2010, well before Google lost their "don't be evil" motto, made the first results page favour sponsors and added AI overview. You respond to a search query with a list of https:// URLs, each accompanied by a representative quote from the destination page that demonstrates the link's relevance to the query, and nothing else. The query is: <insert your query here>
We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have built it with our own hands and it is here to stay.
While there are good alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, or Ecosia, there are also ad-free alternatives, where you're not the product, like Kagi [1] or Uruky [2] (I co-founded Uruky, which is also currently and for the foreseeable future "No-AI")!
[1]: https://kagi.com
[2]: https://uruky.com
I switched to DDG a long time ago (maybe close to a decade now?). There's plenty of reasons to dislike Google, but my main reason for switching was better quality results and a faster, simpler UI.
The UI has gotten a bit clunkier over the years, but it's still good, still more focused than Google's.
As I write this, I give Google Search a quick try and notice that the first thing you see is a full-screen cookie banner!? On my laptop, I even have to scroll to reach the Reject/Accept buttons, and keyboard controls don't work at all. I can't believe people still use this crap.
Kagi is the only search engine that actually provides me with results comparable to plain Google. I do not need to adapt my searches or learn some sort of syntax to avoid pinterest or other offenders. DDG, Bing & Qwant are just not good enough for my use.
Brave Search has its own index which is fine, 10 blue links and no forced AI, and more importantly support for DDG-like "bangs" (like !gi sending you to Google Images), without DDG's performance issues. I highly recommend it for people who don't want to pay for Kagi.
My search on google is still fine. On some searches it doesn't show the AI overview and on some it does - sometimes the AI overview is exactly what i am looking for and sometimes i just scroll down.
I am surprised people are not talking about Brave and its goggles which allow to block off crappy searches like pinterest all the time + a neat community feature and biggest point, its own search index.
Wondering if anyone considered the idea of saving search stubs and using local LLM as agents with it. Could cut the search engine completely from the loop.
The idea is simple: collect search stubs, short documents with routing information about a topic. When you want to search something your agent finds the right stub and looks up where on the web to go find that information. Your information is always fresh, while a search stub changes slowly, over years, because the entry points tend to be more stable.
If we use a 4B local model and another 4GB for search stubs it could be portable enough to download and install. As you use it you also generate your own search stubs on top of the generic package. A stub could contain links to news feeds, high quality hubs, search engines and of course, actual websites. High quality search stubs can be generated with any frontier LLM piggy backing on its agentic search capabilities.
I think the idea of managing a collection of search stubs as a replacement for centralized search engines is important because it would wean us of one of the last centralized points of the internet. Google plays many ranking games on top of users and publishers, serving their own interests first. I want out of that arrangement.
local LLM + local stub index + proxy == anonymity
I've been using Brave search since it was first announced. Initially it had to rely a lot on their "fallback mixing" (where it ran an anonymous search on Google to get more results), but after a year or so I disabled it and never looked back.
I have been running a search engine for online courses for the last 15 years: https://www.classcentral.com/
The current catalog covers 100+ providers, 1000+ universities, and 250,000+ courses.
Originally a weekend side project that I first shared with the world here on HN itself on Nov 29, 2011 [1]. Currently bootstrapped and profitable.
When is Cloudflare stepping into the game? I know many here are wary of CF's increased role in the modern internet but if they can throw a wrench into google's monopoly, I'm all for it.
They intercept a non-trivial portion of the web's traffic and presumably are as equipped as any other company is to build a good index. They're also the only the only company that has an interesting alternative incentive structure for creators.
Surprised not to see a mention of https://tenbluelinks.org/ here.
Google still maintains a web search mode that's free of AI overviews/chat exhortations (as well as ads, if you use an ad blocker). https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&udm=14 is the format of the search URL, and tenbluelinks has instructions on how to use it as your default engine on various platforms.
That said, I've stopped using this as a founder. While I personally like the web search results more (if I wanted synthesis of results, I'd use dedicated agentic-loop-capable tools that are a hotkey away), it's far more important to understand (and empathize with) our users' experiences, good and bad, when they use Google in its full AI extravagance in practice.
For searches where you want more that just the first result and want a depth of results to go through and maybe even check out more than the first page of results I like to use meta-search engines that grab results from multiple sources. Plus it helps route around censorship since you are getting results from a variety of sources. Searxng is the best known one.
I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy.
On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere.
https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
Everyone's tired of hearing about Kagi, and the good news is that they have a free trial now so you can just see for yourself instead of reading comments after comments about it: https://kagi.com/signup?plan_id=trial.
The number of "Kagi" comments here is amusing (suspicious), considering how few people actually use Kagi.
I pretty much only use Google for news searches these days. Even then, it’s mostly just to get a surface-level view before cross-referencing with other engines for anything important.
There’s so much content getting buried now.
If you’re looking for anything remotely niche or legally gray, like sports streams or ebooks, you’re often better off using Yandex or you’ll never find it.
The old Google search engine that used to properly index and surface the open web has been gone for a long time.
Kagi is amazing; I've been using it every day for the last three years and it's been well worth the price. I especially love that they don't shove AI in your face despite having very good AI search available (with locally hosted models!)
I'm afraid of them selling out at this point. If they go, I honestly don't know who will go in their place.
I really really really really want to love Kagi, but every time I try it (and I just spent a month trying it, ending a week or so ago), I end up back at Google, finding that my search results are better.
I think the reason is my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches that Kagi's index just isn't good enough for. I am never searching for something like "best mattress" or anything else that is heavily SEO'd - it's always something very specific - so the result page in Google looks pretty much exactly like the Kagi page, only it nearly always has the result I'm looking for where Kagi's doesn't.
Google hasn't been useful to me as a general search engine for a good while.
I've been using Ddg and Brave for general search and Yandex for deep-ocean expeditions (of the jack sparrow variety) and topics that US tech giants censor. I am looking for good Chinese search engine so that I can search things that Yandex censors or when Yandex's bot detection goes crazy (I get blocked with infinite captcha about 25% of the time).
The only thing Google remains good at is local search. If I want to buy something locally, nothing else comes close.
Google as a search engine peaked in 2005. Since then they've become far more profitable, increased revenue by orders of magnitude, brought search to many more areas, increased headcount massively, improved their share price massively, diversified, serve far more paying customers, become more efficient per query, built data centres, devices and chips with more vertical integration etc. But as a consumer product for simple internet search where I type words and get a list of relevant results it has only gotten slightly worse since then.
This is pure observation/anecdotal. I have no measurements to back this up but I think others will share this view.
I usually switch between DuckDuckGo and Startpage. Both are good.
AltaVista was excellent. On a different timeline we'd be searching on AltaVista running on Alpha chips.
Brave Search is the best alternative because of their independent index, the AI results are still fairly good as well. And their browser rocks because of the built-in ad-blocking including for YouTube, and the ability to filter out all YT Shorts on the mobile app.
Not sure how Brave is. I'm using its API on OpenClaw, and so far my experience with OpenClaw has been satisfactory — though search is only one part of the overall quality.
I'd guess due to compute constraints, AI overview will struggle to reach truly great quality. That said, for now I find adding this section at the top still useful to me. The broader decline in Google's search quality is the bigger drag on me.
Kagi finances Russian war crimes through licensing Yandex's search index.
Any that have a free developer api? Google has shutdown theirs https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
I miss the old days of two weeks ago when you guys complained that Google Search was unusable for non-AI reasons.
I’ve tried them all and found that Kagi is the only one that my subconscious feels is equal to or better than google.
> "Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch"
I would rather not.
Edit: clarifying that this is not strictly due to ads. I think the article itself is an ad judging by the slug 'six-search-engines-worth-trying-now-that-google....'. Usually such articles include a plug. I am not disabling adblocker to read that plug
To be fair, it hasn’t really been one since SEO
Haha, I was going to say "why not bing.com?", but I just tried it with search term 'opencode' and got literally only 3 text results and then the "next page" button. The next page had 6 results, the next page had 13 results. I'm not sure how, but having more money seems to result in worse technology
I’ve been using Kagi for over a year (maybe two?) and it’s been tremendous. I can’t recommend it enough.
> now that Google isn’t really Google anymore
I can't say I've noticed any changes about google search on desktop recently. Yes; there is an AI overview widget at the top of the page; but it's been there for at least a year.
Has anything changed about Google search results for you?
For the first time in their history Google was finding themselves losing market share to ChatGPT. It wasn't a huge amount yet but it was clearly going to become one. That's what this is. The idea that the end user doesn't want this is preposterous. Those of us who make money off the web don't want this but the end user absolutely does.
This is going to happen whether Google does it or not. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
I switched to Kagi years ago, never looked back.
I used Kagi for a bit but began to question what I was paying for, there are plenty of other search providers basically doing the same thing, DDG, Ecosia, Brave search etc. I mostly just use DDG now because search as a paid offering that scrapes results from other indexes doesn’t seem like good value
I turned off AI overviews in Google search a few days ago. It's often wrong and always distracting.
I changed my default search engine to: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
Author should mention that you can change your browser's default search engine.
I don't know what a search engine is anymore, I use Brave search and usually the AI response is more than good, I can dive deeper in AI if needed.
Before, search engines provided links, links provided the info we were looking for. Now AI provides that info without the middle man, links are just a footnote in case you need them.
I find the bigger problem now is how many top results on search engines are AI written websites.
I've used Brave Search and found it better than Google's in some cases
Unfortunately, search results on DuckDuckGo contain AI-generated descriptions. These sometimes contain mistakes.
searxng works well but it's not perfect. I tried qwant for a bit but results were mediocre at best. Kagi, I've shared my views on why I'd never use it. I wouldn't use it even if they paid me to use it in fact. For the time being I'm swapping between searxng and ecosia, the latter has been giving me the best results for just about anything(and I hope their indexer partnership with qwant pays off). As for google - even before the change, results were absolute crap, not a recent thing but since around 2020, the quality of the result hit rock bottom and they have been hard at work, drilling into the rock ever since.
Ecosia is a greenwashing front-end for Google ads. Just like how DuckDuckGo is a privacy washing front-end for Bing ads.
I'm surprised that Perplexity isn't mentioned in the article or on HN. It has replaced Google for all but the most trivial queries. It runs circles around Google for finding anything niche or underspecified.
I use it through OpenRouter - I love how the pricing is per search and isn't a subscription.
I am indeed looking into an alternative to Google recently, but more because of my need of a good search mcp server for my coding agents. I am thinking about either exa or kagi, but I have no idea which one is better. Also exa seems not quite frequently mentioned in the community, wondering why.
a list of engines I ran across the other day: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
The three dominant English search engines with their own indexes are Google, Bing, and Yandex but this list has many spiders and engines that traverse the web.
I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…