Lately, I’ve been trying out Perplexity.AI, its mix of AI answers plus citations makes research far less mind-numbing. I also keep a tab open for privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo and Brave Search, both giving me solid results without being creepy. It’s early, but if something consistently beats Google on usefulness and values, that’s the kind of discovery I’d want to highlight, like when I first found Checkr for background checks.

Lately, I’ve been trying out Perplexity.AI, its mix of AI answers plus citations makes research far less mind-numbing.

@VivaLaPanda how do you feel about chatgpt as a google search alternative

Buying more yes because:

Neeva seems pretty good. Feel like I'm regularly getting better results there when googling fails

Perplexity also seems to be pretty good an is adjacent

Neither of those quite meet my criteria, but if things continue to improve along those lines I'd definitely be compelled.

@VivaLaPanda Too bad about Neeva, but wondering how you're thinking about Perplexity now? It's replaced a lot of my traditional searches.

Also regardless of the search engine, when you are looking for a lot of topics (for example, product recommendations) there are generally better results if you add site:reddit.com at the end of your search

@egroj imo having to do the reddit trick is indicative of Google being bad

@VivaLaPanda I agree, especially for product recommendations, their interest is in you clicking the links that they promote on the top of the searches (the companies that pay them to place them high)

What are your objections to Ecosia, Firefox, etc?

@MurlocKnight Firefox is not a search engine?

Haven't tried Ecosia yet, will do so

I think you should specify more clearly your use-case for Google. Fact lookup? Getting to where you already are trying to get? General research? Random web exploration?

@WarlockTiny General research/question answering

Another alternative search engine is Kagi (https://kagi.com/). It’s paid, but I’ve found it to have better results than Google for the topics I’ve been interested in.

@Gabrielle Will try by EoW and report back

Do you mean as a search engine? I have been using ecosia (https://www.ecosia.org/) for a while and I do not miss google. They don't build a profile on you, so everyone gets the same results. Their model is build on ads at the top of your searches (like any other search engine) but they use the profits to plant trees.

Another similar alternative (minus the trees) is DuckDuckGo

@egroj I don't care about tracking, my objections are just about search result quality

@VivaLaPanda in that case I'm changing my bet. Would you be willing to pay for a monthly fee for a search engine service?

@egroj potentially, but it'd have to be really good