Best search engine

Don’t use Google Search. Fortunately, there are increasing numbers of alternatives, even beyond the Duck Duck Go and Brave options we’ve had for a few years:

In How I search in 2024 (April 25, 2024), Vicki Boykis suggests three options:

Kagi, a for-pay search engine at kagi.com:

the search results are so very good, the business model is really pro-user and I can’t see myself going back to Google unless something very bad happens (please stick around, Kagi.)

I also really love their summarization tool, and Small Web. I’ve been browsing Small Web serendipitously non-stop for the past couple days and have been super surprised and refreshed to find actual people writing actual content that’s not bots, commercials, SEO spam, or aggrandizing. One time, I got a post about a guy sailing his boat down the coast of Mexico, and another about the history of Unix packaging. It’s pleasant and relaxing.

(Update 11-22-24: Should I stop using Kagi because they do business with Yandex? - ~tech - Tildes )

Marginalia, at marginalia.nu:

Marginalia surfaces only non-commerical content . . . The idea is that you find not exactly what you’re looking for, but something related on pages that have long been removed from relevance due to the merciless PageRank.

Perplexity, at perplexity.ai:

Perplexity has been surprisingly good for the use-case of when I want to look something technical up and also want the citations and the links because I don’t trust LLMs to just generate the answer for me. An example is, “how does a solar eclipse work?” Another thing I use it for is summarizing PDFs of Arxiv papers.

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