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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I haven’t noticed any issues with the quality of DDG results, but if you feel the results are lackluster, you could try a metasearch engine like SearXNG. You can self-host it or use one of the many public instances maintained by the community. The main advantage, apart from the privacy focused aspect of the project, is that you can pull results from multiple search engines with a single query. It’s highly customizable too. You can configure it exactly how you want.
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!
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.
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.
Didn’t know about several of these, cheers!
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.
- Have you also experienced this worsening of DuckDuckGo?
Yes.
- Which other more privacy-respecting alternatives do you recommend?
I’m in the same boat. I’ll be trying out these answers.
Same^2
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
At some point, DuckDuckGo stop handling boolean logic properly in search terms. I’ve been using it for more than a decade, and the quality has definitely gotten worse over the last few years
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.
Right on. I’m running searxng and whoogle. Whoogle is a low resource option, and it only sources Google. I like searxng for the deep results, all kinds of weird stuff pops.
I was recently recommended to check out YaCy. Haven’t done it yet.
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
I use Qwant instead and I’m pretty happy wiith that.
I mostly use startpage, but occasionally ecosia and mojeek.
I’ve tried other search engines any times. Despite the worsening google search somehow is still much better than alternatives.
you can search through brave or google using mullvads leta:
I haven’t really experienced a worsening of DDG, and this is a bit off topic, perhaps, but—
I have yet to find a better alternative to Google’s video search. Google Books also remains valuable in many ways, since it will give you different “search inside the book”-type search results than the Internet Archive will (and they also have some books that IA does not).
What’s annoying to me is that StartPage, which is supposed to have Google search results, and by and large does, does not give the same video results as Google (go ahead, try it). It would also be nice to have an Invidious or FreeTube type front end for Google Books, and I believe there used to be something like that, but not any longer.
Some Google products still have definite value, it’s just important that they derive no benefit from us using them.
I remember reading that there was something “fishy” with Startpage, which is why I abandoned it quickly. But don’t remember where.
Luckily I don’t often search for videos, but I agree that it seems difficult to find good search alternatives there.
For what it’s worth, Mullvad recently opened up Leta to people without Mullvad VPN accounts. It’s a google/brave search proxy so pretty much what Startpage claims to do, but I trust Mullvad to actually respect my privacy more than I do Startpage.
I use Startpage and I get decent results. I never google anymore except maps. What is wrong with them?
Ah, sorry, I guess I implied there’s something nefarious going on with Startpage. But there isn’t as far as I can tell. I just trust Mullvad more based on their track record. If you’re happy using Startpage keep using it.
Startpage having a good track record is one of the main reasons why I’m happy to use them. Nothing sketchy so far and decent results. I am also a Mullvad customer for the same reasons.
You can try hosting a searxng instance. If not try some public searxng instances. https://searx.space/
This.
DDG often sucks, but the aggregation evens that out. Plus you can use google without giving them anything. My instance runs via VPN e.g.
