Yeah, I use DDG by default now, and only use Google for hard searches – and even then, I'm continually surprised by the frequency of terrible search results on Google these days.

Kagi has replaced DDG for me entirely. Now that you get unlimited searches, do you think it would for you, too?

Oh Yandex is AWESOME, especially for tech, porn, and piracy. None of its blocked. I get exactly what I'm looking for. No bullshit.

And I don't care if it is Russian. Tells me that the US government wont be buying search history from them, or cooperating in any capacity. Thats actually a double-good.

They used to have a US office, which got me wondering if they're obligated to sell private user information to the US gov't.

Here's their current list of offices:

https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/

So, maybe? (Better than "definitely", though...)

The interesting thing about Yandex is that it isn't even screening political queries (or if it does, it's not effective at it). Search for "bucha massacre" or "резня в буче", and all the top links are to websites that have factual information on it, not Russian agitprop.

Google's been losing in blind comparisons for over a decade (experiments:

- Both have google branding -> competitor wins

- Neither has google branding -> competitor wins

- One (chosen randomly) has google branding -> google branding wins

Yahoo search consistently beat them for a few years before Microsoft bought it and turned it into Bing. It doesn't surprise me at all that Yandex is also producing better results.

I participated in this kind of experiment in 2007 comparing Google to Bing, and ho boy, the Bing results were abysmal.

(Then again Google results today are so abysmal that it wouldn’t surprise me if Bing is now dramatically better.)

Even when Bing was specifically advertising their head-to-head site, every time I tried it, google won. I don't remember when this was -- maybe 2012? -- but I tried it at least a dozen times, and Bing didn't win even once.

2012 was 11 years ago. things have changed, i'm now happy with bing being equal to google. i mostly use duckduckgo.

Bing beats Google for certain queries - most notably when I invoke the AI chat.

And that’s going to be the challenge going forward. For non destination queries, that’s those that are not about finding a specific website, ai search is just so much better.

Kagi had a summerize search results at the top of their results page for a long time.

To my knowledge, Microsoft never bought Yahoo!, but Yahoo! does use Bing for its searches.

Verizon bought Yahoo, not Microsoft- it was never turned into bing. interestingly, a years ago they became independent again.

I switched to Ecoasia when BG3 released and a search for “BG3 wiki” didn’t turn up the actual wiki site on Google. Maybe it’s because it’s on a .wiki subdomain (I’m only 90% sure that’s what it’s at since I haven’t used it for a couple of weeks, but it’s on some “odd” subdomain), but Google returned a plethora of useless wiki sites that were frankly so terrible it hurt. I believe the Duck had largely the same issue, but Ecoasia didn’t.

Anyway, I switched mostly at a joke at first. I had tried replacing Google with DuckDuckGo a few times, and it’s just not good enough. At least not for my searches (and I am Danish, with a work VPN in Holland, so there is that issue to confuse it). Anyway Ecoasia has turned out to be great. I do still use the !g feature once in a while, but far, far, less often than I did on the Duck. It’s actually mostly for when I want to buy stuff since Google is better at listing Danish shops.

'Yandex is better than Google nowadays.'

I also find x is better than y for some things. I switched to DDG a couple of years and seldom have to revert to Google but, to be fair, results tend to be about the same for most queries, save a few nuances.

Kagi are getting a lot of love around here, likely because they block a few annoying domains and boost some others.

The real problem is the quality of free to access sites generally available and this is a problem that's not so simple to solve.