Search Habits - Search Engine General Discussion

[Corrupted Unicorn]

Hi! This is the topic where we talk about having a good sum of the world's knowledge at our fingertips and the lovely virtual assistants that make it happen!    Well, some less lovely than others 

But!! I don't want this place only to discuss which is better, Bing or Google or Yahoo or What-Have-Yoo: I also want to know how you use these search engines, how you used to, how things have changed and why! There's a lot of bad things about search engines nowadays to discuss, unfortunately  , and that's an important topic that deserves attention: but I don't want that to make us loose sight of the inherently amazing tool that is the Internet!    

For example, when I was a kid, I was definitively the kind to search one thing on the web and then go thru pages and pages of search engine results to try to absorb as much information from the topic as I could  good thing I always picked obscure and niche topics (like that one obscure comic my favourite Spanish artist made when he lost the rights to his characters).

Nowadays, I use Startpage because I don't like "infinite scrolling" and I'll take the finite option whenever I can. I don't really play with filters or those +"thing to include here" / -"thing to NOT include here" commands unless I'm trying to be very specific (or cribbing away results from Pinterest  ). I wish the image results were better (in general, not just Startpage)

So yeah, search engines! Which ones do you know? Which ones do you use? Do you stick to one or do you use several, and why? Do you apply filters or commands? How do you make it so despite the enshittification, your search engine still serves you well while surfing the net? Discuss! 

[Yuvi]

This isnt something very common, but the search engine i use is actually a paid one called Kagi. its a pretty good privacy-respecting search engine that (like i said before) is paid! I have a lot of reasons as to why i pay for Kagi but it just mostly boils down to

• Pirvacy
• Being good

before i was paying for Kagi i was using this proxy search engine known as 4get, specifically the 4get.ch instance. i proxy searched with google on 4get for a while but that was kinda a pain in the ass, to be honest. Not rlly 4get's fault, just google being google and making it annoying to use with a proxy

now... onto what i actually search

a large majority of my searches is 1 or 2 (or 3) word keywords for an image or website. like "ip address" or "sans sprite" or "chicken coop stardew valley" or "kishibe"

some of my searches are posted as questions, like "how to sharpen a pencil with a craft knife" or "how to set up boarderless fullscreen on any game"

sometimes i'll even use Kagi's built in small-web and fourms features which will show me search results with only the indie sites indexed on it   i think thats how i actually came across this fourm. i got bored and wrote 'forum' in the small web area and came across this. another thing i love about kagi (i promise im not shilling) is that it actually does index quite a bit of small web sources too, which is cool.

changing my search engine away google, is (in my opinion) a really key step for maintaining internet privacy as well.

also, quick question OP, does startpage index from google or ddg(bing)? i haven't been able to find a clear answer and im curious if you know

[rainboe]

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while now. I'm not sure if it's the best option, but I switched to it more out of split second anger (at google showing me 1 billion sponsored results before anything useful) than careful consideration...
Generally I'm less of a searcher and more of a URL typer. I've got most of my daily stuff & other resources in my Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and then I kind of just... link hop around from those sites!
Though, I have been known to search something I'm interested in and then read every result that pops up on it, absorbing useless knowledge like a sponge...
That, or I'm throwing poorly worded pleas for coding help at the poor thing, which usually just leads me to StackOverflow for the 1000th time XD
I definitely narrow down my searches sometimes, when the internet is just too vast for me. Here's a good little article on that! 

[candycanearter07]

DuckDuckGo. Probably not the *best* searcher out there, but definitely better than google, at least it doesnt shove ai down your throat. Mostly, I just look up tech questions, like how the css position element works for the thousandth time, or how to get something to work on linux

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

I use SearX over the multi-instance picker hosted on Neocities. I went for it when a book with the same name as my own music project was released, and pressed me out of google/bing/startpage by heavy SEOing. SearX still shows up my project instead of the book - this convinced me of its quality . However, quality of results differs heavily, and if it doesn't work well, I use Startpage.

I sometimes search for single or a few words, sometimes for whole sentences.

[Oceansandy02]

I've been switching between some, but it have gotten used to Startpage and DuckDuckGo. Both sites are supposed to keep privacy, and I feel like it depends on how I'm feeling about it. I appreciate that unlike Google, it doesn't shove reddit to the fromt page., even though I lurk a lot.

At school, I use bing or google, bing If I an at new media class, and Google on my cheomebook.