I was watching the RFK Jr questioning today and when Bernie was talking about healthcare and wages I felt he was the only one who gave a real damn. I also thought “Wow he’s kinda old” so I asked my phone how old he actually was. Gemini however, wouldnt answer a simple, factual question about him. What the hell? (The answer is 83 years old btw, good luck america)
I still use web search all the time, I just don’t use Google. There are great alternatives:
Do any of them actually work? As in, you search something and it gives you relevant results to the whole thing you typed in?
I’ve used DuckDuckGo for a long time, so I would say yes. But the best way to figure that out is just to try it for a while. There is literally nothing to lose.
I have been using it for about 7 years and its just as shit.
DDG really likes to give bullshit AI generated website results. “Top 7 [thing] to buy in 2025”. And after reading for 2 minutes, you realize the page is utter shit. Paragraphs of fluff, some referral links, and absolutely no expert advice.
It’s gotten really bad lately. Changing search terms in my query to the point where it’s searching for something completely different.
Also, it’s extremely us centric. It will frequently return results from shops that do not exist where I live in favour of american ones
It’s always going to depend on what you’re searching for. I just tried searching for home coffee roasting on Swiss Cows and all of the results were legit, no crappy spam sites.
Marginalia is great for finding obscure sites but many normal sites don’t show up there. Million Short is a similar idea but with a different approach to achieving it.
The problem of search is actually extremely hard because there are millions of scam and spam sites out there that are full of ads and either AI slop or literally stolen content from other popular sites. Somehow these sites need to be blocked in order to give good results. It’s a never-ending, always-evolving battle, just like blocking spam in email (I still have to check my spam folder all the time because legit emails end up flagged as spam).
DDG and Ecosia are proxies for Bing. I didn’t check, but I’m guessing the others are too. Most “independent” search engines are.
The major exception is Startpage, which is a proxy for Google.
Marginalia is not.
Marginalia and Million Short have their own index as far as I know. Fireball is another one being independent from both Google and Bing.
startpage is a proxy for google?
That one’s pretty obvious. From their main page:
Or all of the above, using SearXNG.