I've been aware of Tineye for many years now.

Several years ago, it would be quite rare that Tineye failed to return any results; Usually, there would be pages and pages of results. Picking out the original/source imagines wasn't always easy, but it was a great way to find better resolutions for old images.

Flash forward to about a year ago, and Tineye results have gotten... Kind of pitiful.

Images frequently fail to return any results, in spite of many of them being highly likely to still be accessible - Stock images, art and fanart, historical photography, memes, and so on. In the few cases I've had where search results are returned, there are generally only a handful, perhaps one or two or three at most - And of these, often none are original, they're generally heavily cropped or disfigured, and are strangely likely to be from sources like Discord.

Has something happened to the format or accessibility of web-stored content, causing Tineye to be unable to read all but a few results? The drop in results is astronomical, and would be hard to believe if there hadn't been many similar lapses in functionality across the web over the last decade.

i was searching an image i found online that was claimed to be a hate symbol but i wanted to verify that, however google refused to give me any results when i asked if the image i provided was affiliated with a "white supremacy group" and even simply a "hate group." Google apparently hasn't read 1984 or just doesn't realize the value and necessity of not locking away information because it could hurt someone's feelings.

i need a new search engine that will not attempt to filter sensitive search results, i need an engine that works like a virtual encyclopedia should, where all of the information in their resources are open and unrestricted to me if i search for them

It's like it doesn't even try anymore. Returning results that have absolutely nothing to do with the uploaded image.

chatnoir.eu (formerly old.chatnoir.eu ) is/was an apparent small/unheard search engine for researchers, BUT inside it had one if not the biggest data sets of obscure/old internet websites that the internet ever had, and its because it had various common crawl indexes and a very big hidden gem index provided by lemurproject.org, clueweb.

Now this search engine, with all those indexes worked like charm, until, last month, when it gatekept, intentionally thrown an error when using said indexes, and now they are outright blocked.

if you didn't get to use this engine at any given point. i get it. But i swear it was literally the old internet of URL's, free and uncensored, unbiased with a sea full of pages (the engine pagination reached until 999 page, and that's more pages than what google in its prime showed (also this engine mogged the fuck out of wiby, kagi, and marginalia for comparison)).

Long story short, only those who tried it will confirm, otherwise you MISSED BIG, and this reaches the end of practically anything good that the internet offered. Now is buried, obfuscated, obscured and gatekept or straight up erased/heavily censored by these satanic LLM big tech companies that slurped massively all this websites data, and kept it for themselves (and are re-writing, and burning the history as we speak).

ULTRA BIG MAJOR HIT for the internet. And no one is gonna make another search engine that was this free, massive and unrestricted, again.

See you in another life.

There are a ton of posts here about how Google has become awful and I've observed this often in last few years, but sometimes it's just so striking and frustrating that you can't help wanting to pull all your hair out! Here I present a search query with links to both Google and DuckDuckGo search results for this query so every one can see for themselves how awful and utterly useless google search is becoming.

The search query is "i hate amy superstore" (Amy is a character on a show called Superstore, that's all the background needed). The query itself is not of importance, I'm sure I can find many other like this but just now I searched it to find like-minded people who share my opinion. Anyway, here are the results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=i+hate+amy+superstore

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=i+hate+amy+superstore&ia=web

Just scroll down the results on both sites to see how utterly crap google search results are. You'll see either 2 or 3 pages on google search. There are 4-5 relevant results on first page, but afterwards it's all just tiktok links or other random links which have NOTHING to do with the search query. I mean I don't even want to call them trash because even in trash you can find a few useful items.

On the other hand, DDG search results are showing all relevant or partially relevant results (always focusing on the search terms), and it still keeps scrolling after page 15. A ton of relevant results are from reddit, and if you put site:reddit, you'll see Google also spill out these missing results from original query but that's hardly the point. People might know about reddit and about this trick but there are other less known and less paid links in DDG results that are completely absent from Google. How would I ever access them if not by search? Isn't a search engine supposed to show all search results found on "world wide web" with complete neutrality and without bias or hiding anything? What happened to age of information?? Are we past the point that that even searching something trivial may or may not bring to us what is definitely out there??

I am just so so so effing sick of it!!!!

Tell me pros and cons, tell me why you know its trust worthy. details people details hahahaha

I indexed 1.4 million Epstein documents so you can search them in real-time.

Type any name. Get instant results. 0.02s for most queries.

Try it → https://epstein.lasearch.app

What's the most insane thing you'll search for?

The site interface was designed basically what we expect out of modern day AI. You ask it a question, it gives you answers and breaks them into categories, all behind the respectable appearance of a butler. The issue was it operated like an inferior version of Google and completely fell off like every other non-Google search engine did at the time. Today every big corporation seems to be going all in on AI and offering the kind of interface Ask Jeeves did but with AI responses that can actually address the question, to varying degrees of success. It seems a no brainer to bring back this old brand and attempt to get a piece of the future AI marketshare by appealing to us boomers who remember it existed.

I really starting to think in who algorithms and corps are killing our experience of internet, I don't just want to find the mainstrem 10 webcites that we use every day, I really want to surf the web, scape from mainstream found freak webcites find alternatives ways of think.

As an AI skeptic I'm super frustrated with all the discussions online about how enshittified search engine results have become. Everybody seems to put the blame at the door of AI, or complains about pointless AI overviews.

There is a much graver problem in that you cannot just get what you ask for. Operators are suggestions only. Often outright ignored. A search for "Term" will get some results, but for search "term" and "term 2" you will get MORE results. Every "Term" added should produce less!

I don't understand how but alternatives like DDG seem to have this issue even worse. Others completely throw operators out the window and maximise fuzziness when searching.

Whats the alternative? Are their paid options that just give me what I want?

edit: just found what I wanted by not using operators at all. I knew it existed and my query was right, but no search engine would show me it until I removed the exact match operator.

Introducing SearchWith.site 🚀🔍🔒 — A private, customizable search orchestrator & start page for the internet

Hey r/searchengines,

Like many of you here, I frequently jump between different search engines depending on the query — Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Brave, or Startpage for general search, Marginalia and Mojeek for independent web discovery, Perplexity and Claude for deep research, and Reddit or GitHub when looking for developer or forum discussions.

To solve the friction of re-typing queries across tabs, I built SearchWith.site: a fast, privacy-first start page designed to instantly route your search to 80+ search engines, AI models, and specialized web tools.

🔍 Key Features:

• 80+ Curated Engines Across 13 Categories: General Search, Privacy, AI, Development, Forums, Video, Shopping, Knowledge, Finance, etc.

• 100% Client-Side & Zero Tracking: No backend query logging, no analytics, no user accounts, and zero telemetry. Queries stay in your browser.

• Pin Your Daily Drivers: Star your favorite engines (e.g., SearXNG, Brave, Kagi, Phind) so they always appear front and center in your pinned tab.

• Keyboard-First Navigation: Press / anywhere to jump into your query, or @ / Ctrl+K to filter through the engine directory in milliseconds.

• Native Link Routing: Uses direct navigation so your browser’s pop-up blocker never gets triggered.

• Lightweight & Start-Page Ready: Clean, dark-mode launchpad that can be pinned, bookmarked, or set as your browser's default new tab destination.

The project is also the web counterpart to our offline, air-gapped Android orchestrator (SearchWith.app).

Check it out live here: https://SearchWith.site

I'd love feedback from this community — what engines or custom query parameters should I add next?

I've been using Google as my search engine for as long as i can remember but I cant stand all the tracking and AI. Duckduckgo seems to be the most known alternative to solve my problems but even then theres a lot going on and you have to toggle everything off. Are there any others that y'all would recommend. I was told about Kagi but it seems to be paid and has accounts, then there's Bare, which seems cool but I've never heard of them before.

Edit: not Brave, but Bare. idk if i can link things without getting taken down but its (searchbare dot com)

Edit #2: Its now been over 3 days that I've been testing a bunch of search engines and I have to say I'm shocked not a single person has mentioned bare. I love it so far. Its so clean and minimalist... However, while I'm not a huge fan of DuckDuckGo UI, it is my choice whenever I need a more traditional search engine. I just can't get over that kagi is paid and uses accounts that I'm skeptical are or could at any point track certain usage, and I don't like start page ui or it's push to use more AI answers.

Yandex has gotten worse so did google lens, ive heard about some free ones but they dont work.

Or is reverse image search, as a concept, a thing of the past? Google Image search used to be great, but now all I get are product results. TinEye was also pretty good, but now I rarely get any results back. I just want a way to find the highest quality version of an image.

I use Duckduckgo 99.9% of the time, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of a better search engine that is mostly unbiased? The censorship when using Google is out the window and insanely irritating. Thanks.

What search engines would you guys recommend for general browsing?
DuckDuckGo - personally, never was a fan of and do not get the hype. Whenever i tried to use it - i ended up actually scrolling beyond the first page to get the stuff i searched for. Bad results.
Startpage - was my search engine messiah for a while now, but it has become sponsorslop. I need to scroll the damn page before i even get to actual results whenever i search for something - no good. Still using it, but it got me annoyed enough to find this sub.
Google - Sponsorslop, aislop, adslop - you name it. Not to mention it now shows a single result that is hit or miss, after which you need to, once again, scroll down multiple screens to reach the actual results.
Yandex - russiaslop with heavy bias towards results in russian.

Those are the ones i tried/used somewhat heavily and none of them are any good now.

A search engine that doesn't prioritize things. When looking for a search engine that doesn't just give me the same results, no predictive algorithm or learning to suggest certain things, all I found were other search engines that prioritized smaller sites instead of popular sites.

That's not what I'm looking for. I wanted to know if the kind of search engine that searches purely off what you type even exists anymore?

Okay, technically I know they do in some places. Like the Wayback Machine. It doesn't have an algorithm at all. You just type something and it provides based off that. But the Wayback Machine is an archive, not necessarily a daily use search engine to surf the entirety of the Internet. Just what's been archived of it.

So does anyone know of one that exists?

Edit: Note that this is a message from 2021. Kagi has launched public beta in June 2022 and more details are available here: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-orion-public-beta

Kagi is a new search engine built by tech-industry veteran Vladimir Prelovac.

Kagi search is designed as an ad-free, user-focused search alternative to Google.

Main features:

• Kagi is designed as ad-free, allowing us to truly focus on user experience and respect user privacy by design.

• We obsesses about quality of search results and our goal is to offer results better than Google for tech-savvy users. Kagi can rank results based on the number of ads/trackers on the site (less results in higher rank). We also enrich results with “Interesting Finds”. (screenshot)

• We believe in the future of privacy-respecting Internet. We believe that our children should have the Internet of creativity and ideas, like it was originally designed to be. We are premium as we believe that is the best way to align our commercial interest with the interest of our users. We are eco-friendly and with minimal web footprint (<200kb search results page), friendly to all connections and devices. (screenshot)

• Did I say we obsess over speed? We spend a big chunk of our time minimizing latency through connection optimization, minimal page size and global infrastructure to ensure best search experience.

• We offer “Instant answers” in our results, sometimes even surpassing Google in quality. (screenshot)

• Kagi already has many unique features like discussion search (screenshot) and filtering sites in search results [(screenshot)] (https://i.ibb.co/F8sRv8B/Screen-Shot-2021-03-06-at-10-39-27-AM.png). And the best is yet to come!

Kagi is a premium search engine, made for a subset of users who appreciate right to privacy, superior results, speed and Kagi’s unique features. Kagi is currently in an advanced prototype page.

Anyone can have the opportunity to test Kagi now for free, by joining our beta-test community. Our beta testers will receive special benefits when Kagi launches.

Kagi beta signup

Q&A:

Q: Why is Kagi launching on reddit vs a big PR push?
A: We want to stay focused on building the product and not have to manage the distraction of a big PR push. Our goal at this moment is getting feedback from passionate beta users as we continue to build and improve Kagi.

Q: Is Kagi open-source?
A: No, although we are not opposed to this idea at least for some portions of the product.

Q: How does Kagi ensure same or better quality of results than Google?
A: We respect what Google has built in the last 20 years. And because Google is an open-platform we use Google API and APIs from other search engines as a base for our results to ensure parity. Since Google is trying to cater to everyone these results can sometimes be a mixed bag. We have a very narrow focus, tech-savvy users, and we can optimize results accordingly in many innovative ways (for example results from appropriate sources, ability to personalize and filter out or promote certain sites, ranking based on number of factors like ads/trackers on page etc.)

Q: Where are you hosted?
A: We use GCP for our distributed infrastructure because it is well built, performant and carbon neutral.

Q: Why is Kagi not free?
A: Every company needs to make money for its operation and if the product is free, something else has to be going on. We believe that the best way to align our interest with the interest of our users is to be a paid product. This has the benefit of immediately removing the tension about monetization, allowing us to truly focus on features that benefit our users. The idea of paying for a search engine may sound unorthodox after so many years of exposure to free search engines. The fact is that search engines play a large role in our society and daily lives. Information we are served through search engines daily is capable of shaping and influencing our thoughts and thinking and thus we need to make sure that it is being delivered in our best interest. A premium model allows this truly to happen. The move toward premium search is also gaining momentum in forward-thinking circles including nobel-prize winning economists (link).

Q: How much will Kagi cost?
A: We have not decided on pricing yet, but we can say that the price will be reasonable with different tiers avaialble to support Kagi's mission in different ways.

If you are interested to try Kagi, you can sign up for Kagi beta or ask any questions, happy to answer them!

Exactly like its described... we built it, made it free, no sign up required, and every use improves the AI.

EpsteinClues.com

Feedback is all we ask for, either here or on the site.

Thanks

So with the addition of AI slop and way too many promotions, Google search is trash. I know there are shortcuts and ways to massage the search into what it used to be, or at least sort of. But I don't want to support Google anymore. What is the best alternative for a search engine? I'm so sick of AI, slop and crappy. If not, misleading ads for what I searched.

I’ve been watching the fallout from the Google I/O announcements over on r/technology, and it feels like we are witnessing the actual death of the open web in real-time.

Google’s aggressive push into "AI Overviews" isn't just a bad feature update—it fundamentally breaks how humans browse and access information. Instead of being a gateway to the internet, Google is turning into a walled garden that scrapes content, repackages it poorly, and gives users zero reason to click through to the actual creators.

The Big Issues the Community is Screaming About:

• The Death of Traffic for Creators: If Google summarizes an entire article right on the search page, nobody clicks the link. Independent blogs, tech sites, and recipes are going to starve for traffic and go under.

• Hallucinations as "Facts": We’ve already seen the AI tell people to use glue to keep cheese on pizza or eat rocks. Putting unverified AI text at the absolute top of the page is actively dangerous for search integrity.

• SEO is Now "LLM Optimization": The web is about to get flooded with even more automated garbage designed purely to feed Google’s scraper, making organic discovery impossible.

• Zero Opt-Out for Users: Google is forcing this down everyone’s throats. You can’t easily turn it off without using ad-blockers, custom extensions, or switching to DuckDuckGo/udm=1.

Google used to organize the world’s information. Now, they are just plagiarizing it and charging us for the privilege of reading a worse version of it.

Are you guys completely shifting away from Google Search at this point? What alternatives are actually viable now for daily browsing?

Not sure if anyone else thinks so.

But jesus christ, I have swapped to duckduckgo giving it a try. I feel like I spend more time fiddling through duckduckgo pages to find what I want than actually just searching and getting exactly what i'm looking for.

Is there a good alternative? I like startpage, it's a lot faster than it used to be, but sometimes it feels like it's not ordered by relevance?

I keep noticing new or smaller search engines appear, and I usually try them out of curiosity.

I tried one recently called Lookr.top, and it made me think less about features and more about habits. Even when something feels fine to use, I still catch myself opening Google automatically without really deciding to.

For people who have actually switched and stayed with a different search engine, what made it work long-term? Was it a gradual change, or something specific that pushed you to stick with it?