Big week! We just finished moving the Overwatch and Fortnite wikis off of Fandom. It’s still my favorite thing in the world to help wiki editors grab control of their projects and make them awesome (and not covered with a dozen auto-playing video ads!)
I have switched to DuckDuckgo and while their index is crap, it’s at least has more crap than what Google has.
DuckDuckgo I believe leases the Bing engine so I am still trying others.
also now I am using the direct search engines for specific sites… eg ‘@wiki <my search query>’ to use Wikipedias onwn search.
I unfortunately really like the image and info widgets that Google shows, when you search for movies, shows and actors.
Google on the left, DDG on thge right. It saves me time, when I just quickly want to know what they look like, where they’re from, how old they are, what other movies are they well-known for, etc.
I love setting up my own search engines. Except for when I change browsers! Haha. Then it sucks having to migrate them all. If I ever switch away from Zen Browser, I might just set them up in Raycast instead, so I don’t have to set them up anew, when I try out new browsers.
I agree they are way ahead of anyone else for utility but they’re also killing the internet.
ddg uses the bing web crawler to index pages but then applies its own sorting algorithm for search results
Startpage uses Google’s index, or used to. At very least, it seems to have more and different results than DuckDuckGo.
Oh interesting, Startpage looks like it has access to Google’s image search dataset and possibly their crazy ass vector basesd mobius strip index system
Try dogpile.
so wierd to hear that in this millenium.
I know but its still there and its still so good.
Searxng was working pretty well for me until everyone started blocking even my own instance.
never heard of that thing before.
i have this problem. I use ddg sometimes to find wiki info, and if the piece of info is too new, ddg just gives me some clearly vibe-coded page with bogus information.
last week i waded through like 6 fake fields of Mistria wikis on the first page of ddg before giving up and finding the “official” ones on Google
Apologies if you already know this. Sharing because if you’re spending a lot of time searching a game wiki, this can be really convenient.
You can setup your browser for typing ‘@mistria juniper’ would bring up the wiki search page for everything related to that character.
disclaimer: I think Chromium can do this too
If you are often referring to a wiki, you can temporarily add it as a search engine to your browser’s internal location search bar.
With FireFox -> Settings -> Search -> “Add search engine” in the “Additional search engines”
I picked a random mistria wiki and the URL would be
https://fieldsofmistria.wiki.gg/wiki/Special:Search?search=%25s&go=Go&ns0=1for searching.For name ‘@mistria’ should be unique enough.
I got that by typing “test” in the search box to get this “https://fieldsofmistria.wiki.gg/wiki/Special:Search?search=Test&go=Go&ns0=1” just swap out the ‘Test’ for ‘%s’
Now press ctrl + l to focus on the location/search bar and type “@mistria juniper” to get an in wiki search results for everything related to that character.
One exception. if the url has something like ‘nonce=a4F7DEF’ or other hex crap, it is probably not going to work and may get your IP temporarily blocked.
Custom searches are awesome! There might be an even easier way:
With Firefox, most of the time, you can right-click a web page’s search box and choose “Add Search Engine,” and you’ll get a box allowing you to give the search a name and a search bar keyword. Which you can edit later with Settings -> Search if needed.
Great suggestion and it works more often than not.
My experience has been the opposite. Often I have to turn to Google to get the results I want.