For several years I’ve been using DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search, and I’ve been overall quite happy with the results. Only rarely had I to resort to Google search (!g).
During the last month or two, however, I’ve found myself using the !g switch and Google search more than half of the time. DuckDuckGo shows no or few results where Google shows more (and useful) ones.
Still I don’t want to give in. So:
- Have you also experienced this worsening of DuckDuckGo?
- Which other more privacy-respecting alternatives do you recommend?
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DuckDuckGo/Bing is pretty bad at finding stuff in my native language. That’s why I use Startpage (and sometimes even Google) more nowadays.
Duckduckgo gives you Bing results. If you like Microsoft they are up the alley. If not tough luck.
DDG is often but not always a lot worse than Google in my experience.
There’s only a handful of companies out there actually spidering. A lot of third party offerings are just re-scraping the existing spiders. I wouldn’t be surprised if deficiencies in quality were cat and mouse games between google/bing/et all and DuckDuckGo.
I’ve been self-hosting SearXNG. It’s fantastic for everything except local hits, business hours, stuff where Google maps data is being referenced.
I think the problem with free search is that somebody needs to pay for it. There’s more people block both ads and anonymize themselves, the more free options will eventually wither.
And while I’m perfectly willing to pay for ad-free anonymity, capitalism dictates that all services need to have exponential growth or fail, and eventually all that data can just be sold or otherwise make it into the wrong hands.
I’m kind of hoping that at some point you can purchase distilled search content in a locally hostable AI model. It could post ad free and complete anonymous access, and you just need to pay for updates to the search model.
I’ve been using SearXNG during the last day and I’m quite impressed too so far!
True what you say about the problems behind net search. It’s actually a very complex problem. In my opinion part of the problem is that there’s a lot (most?) of rubbish out there. It’s like a library with useful books of different genres all mixed together, and mixed with an even larger amount of nonsense books. Maybe a solution would be something completely different from indexing – but I have no idea what.
It’s an old problem. From the very start of the net, you had to sort the wheat from the chaff. Back then, the BS was human-generated. Now we have the addition of AI crap. But anyway, they solved it already. Its called wikipedia. (Or any other community curated data source as well.) I’m not some wiki fan, but that’s the world’s answer to encroaching bad data. An army of real, very corruptible, infighting, weird-as-hell wiki editors is our last stand against the BS.
I have thought the same thing after about three years or so of using DDG, I’ve been using Qwant as of late and seem to get much better results
Same, I was a DDG user for years and switched to Qwant a month ago. Qwant results are a step up from DDG, and Qwant takes the same approach to privacy as DDG but it’s based in France so it wins in that regard as well. I’m in the US and Qwant still does a great job of providing localized results.
I use Qwant instead and I’m pretty happy wiith that.
Qwant aparrently aren’t very private
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And for anyone who doesn’t know: SearX is pronounced “Search”, and it’s successor, SearXNG, is pronounced “Searching”.
(In many languages “x” signals a “ch” sound)
Note: But maybe don’t go around saying “Have you Searching’d it yet?”
I like SearXNG, you get all of all worlds
I’ve only used searx[ng] for several years. searx.space is pretty recommended to look for searxng working instances, as well as the ones that you might prefer depending of the country of the instance and so for. Public searx but no searxng working instances are really uncommon now a days.
Every now and then your preferred instance becomes useless (whether google finds its way to block it, or to apply an aggressive rate limiter, or the instance gets unmaintained), so one needs to look for another one.
DDG doesn’t give bad results, but when I realized the majority of its results come from bing, meaning it’s mostly a metasearch as well with a few entries of its own (that might have varied from that time), I then started to only use searx, and then when searx working instances were really hard to find I moved to searxng, and I’m happy with those instances. Again, at times I need to move to a different instance, though I’ve been using the last one I chose for more than a year now…
Public instances need to fight against the giants, but running your own local version is easy if you learn to use Docker. It just takes around a hundred of megabytes of memory. I have been super happy with it.
This shit right here!
You can find a good Searxng instance or run your own (it can also run on a RPi)
This.
I’m using perennialte.ch, they redirect reddit urls to redlib which is a nice touch.
I went ddg > kagi > searxng and this is the set up I’m happiest with.
Kagi is pretty amazing. You have to pay but the peace of mind is worth it for the respect of your privacy. FastGPT is a phenomenally helpful tool that I use multiple times per day. Kagi.com
Thank you for the suggestion. I tried Kagi a couple of times, but it missed the useful results that DDG or Google were giving, so I dropped it.
It depends of course on what kinds of searches one typically needs. Probably there isn’t a universally best search engine.
I switched to Kagi and am beyond satisfied. If your goal is to strictly degoogle, it fits the bill, but it still does if you are looking for better privacy, as it now comes with an implementation of Privacy Pass. The algorithm is leagues above Google’s and DDGs, IMO, and the “lens” feature allows you to seamlessly filter the results to specialized sources, including the Fediverse. “Small web” is a fun feature for when you’re bored running unit tests at work, too
I tried Kagi for a while, but it was giving me less useful results than DDG, so I simply left it. I think it depends a lot on what kinds of searches one does, and Kagi is more useful for other users.
AFAIK the algorithm for Kagi is really alien compared to Google and Bing/DDG, so the results do look a little weird at first, the main difference being just the sheer reduction in quantity of results.
But I guess if you didn’t like it, you didn’t. Maybe it is worse and I’m biased because I already paid
I have been very happy with Kagi. I think that it is worth the money. I did quit it though, in line with the US boycott, so now i am on Quant.
Also very happy using Kagi.
@Tiger @cosmicrookie Also happy using Kagi.
Kagi has been very nice for me as well. The lack of clutter and junk plus wealth of search features makes it well worth the price for me.
Kagi is so much better than any other search engine I used in years. In fact, it’s too good because I don’t see myself quitting it soon, even though I’d really prefer not using American services right now.
Been happy with Kagi for the past few months. So far no thoughts of switching back to either Google or DDG.
