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searxng
SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
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Right now I am okay with DDG. The amount of times I have resorted to tacking on the !g has only been decreasing.
I also use one extra thing, an extension called 'highlight or hide search engine results'[1]. I have first party documentation highlighted in blue, good community sites in green, lower quality sites greyed out, and content farms hidden completely. I've also been storing page highlights in raindrop.io[2]
Between the two of these I spend less overall time actually reviewing the search results and it is easier for me to return to good results that I found in the past.
[1] https://github.com/pistom/hohser
As a developer, I agree. When coding, I look for four things:
- well-written blog articles
A single article, describing a real dev solving a real business challenge with real code, is the best way to answer technical questions. They provide a lot of context, and reasoning, and have real-world advice which is invaluable to me.
I use Google for this, but it requires care. A lot of sites are poorly written, or copied from other sites, or are gibberish. With experience you can quickly tell if a blog post is going to be of high enough quality or not.
- short answers, or reference documentation
Google/StackOverflow is okay to answer the question "I have tech X and want Y using library Z". Just recently I've switched to asking GitHub Copilot for answers to small questions. It's not perfect but incredibly valuable. The big downside is since Copilot sends code to a server, it's not okay when working with client code. Copilot is great for learning, though.
For reference docs I use Google to find manpage sites, then I setup custom searches for them. Example: https://man.cx/ for Linux docs, and https://ss64.com/osx/ for macOS.
There's also https://devdocs.io/ which is incredibly fast but too webdev-centric compared to my normal work.
SearX - in my case SearXNG [1] - running on the server-under-the-stairs, pointed at a host of different search engines (including Google). It'll give you results returned by all of those engines, it makes clear which subjects are being censored by which search engine and it makes sure your search history does not end up feeding the data-hungry beasts of Google, Apple, Microsoft and all the others.
[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
https://searx.ebnar.xyz/
One of the many SearXNG available, see https://searx.space