Technology

On first read this sounded like you were challenging the basis of the previous comment. But then you went on to provide a couple of your own examples.

So on that basis after rereading your comment, it sounds like maybe you’re actually looking for recommendations.

Ive seen a lot of praise for Kagi over the past year. I’ve finally started playing around with the free tier and I think it’s definitely worth checking out.

Through the years I've bounced between different engines. I gave Bing a decent go some years back, mostly because I was interested in gauging the performance and wanted to just pit something against Google. After that I've swapped between Qwant and Startpage a bunch. I'm a big fan of Startpage's "Anonymous view" function.

Since then I've landed on Kagi, which I've used for almost a year now. It's the first search engine I've used that you can make work for you. I use the lens feature to focus on specific tasks, and de-prioritise pages that annoy me, sometimes outright omitting results from sites I find useless or unserious. For example when I'm doing web stuff and need to reference the MDN, I don't really care for w3schools polluting my results.

I'm a big fan of using my own agency and making my own decisions, and the recent trend in making LLMs think for us is something I find rather worrying, it allows for a much subtler manipulation than what Google does with its rankings and sponsor inserts.

Perplexity openly talking about wanting to buy Chrome and harvesting basically all the private data is also terrifying, thus I wouldn't touch that service with a stick. That said, I appreciate their candour, somehow being open about being evil is a lot more palatable to me than all these companies pretending to be good.