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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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 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.
This is awesome. Is there a DDG !bang for this? I would love to use it in place of !g for the few times I resort to !g.
I just checked and it doesn’t look like it (if you want to search for DDG bangs here’s the link, just scroll down a bit.. But you could always just add Leta as a search engine in your browser preferences and set a keystroke for it. For example, type L into the URL bar then space and it’ll use Leta for your query. (Note, I use Firefox, not sure if it’s the same with Chromium based browsers).
I submitted a request for !leta. If it gets rejected I’ll try what you said. +1 for Firefox.
StartPage should be !sp.
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.
I mostly use startpage, but occasionally ecosia and mojeek.
- 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’ve tried other search engines any times. Despite the worsening google search somehow is still much better than alternatives.
I haven’t experienced any issues with search results with DDG. But if you feel it’s a problem, 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 with it 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.
Tried using public instances, but 1/3 searches was failing. Found it unusable. That was like a year ago when I was looking for DDG alternatives.
I’ve had good luck with searxng.site, but yeah, public instances aren’t going to have the uptime and reliability of Google or DDG. Think of public instances as a test drive. You get a vibe for it but it’s a much better ride when you self-host.
This is unfortunately the same type of experience I’ve had with SearXNG. 🙁
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…
For me at least, searxng.world works. I just went to searx.space, opened loads of them in a list, and left the ones that weren’t blocked in my country. (the only ones left were searxng.world and two really specific local ones with alphabet soup names)
Trying it these past days and I’m impressed!
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?”
This shit right here!
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.
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 like qwant.com from France. They are using the Bing index but started to collaborate with Ecosia to build their own.
+1, Qwant is awesome
I’ll try qwant!
Do they still pop up a modal dialog asking you to disable your ad-blocker? That was what killed Qwant for me.
I have never seen that. So not sure if qwant got better… or the adblockers.
I’ve been using this for about a month now and have been happy with it too
I think in the last few years DDG has been improving and google has been worsening for general searching. Because I have nearly stopped using
!gbefore I used it constantly.I still use google at work as the results there match a bit better.
Startpage uses Google’s results, similar to like DDG uses Bing’s, I find to be splendid replacement for spying engine.
I’ve noticed this is the case but not that it’s declining. I haven’t used it that long.
I’ve definitely felt the enshittification of DDG. A couple of years ago they would start dropping hits related to my location into my search results, even when I had region off and private search by default. That gave me the impression that my IP address was being used and possibly passed on to Bing, but I don’t have the chops to confirm it 🤷
Been using Qwant for about a month. Feels like of like old Google did, very happy.
Only place it’s lacking is image search, but Google has been pretty shite for the past year too.
Same, but I’ve found Quants image search to be good enough.
It’s passable so I don’t really mind it. It uses Bing’s image search if I remember right.
I use Qwant instead and I’m pretty happy wiith that.
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
I haven’t used DDG in years. I’ve been using Start Page and its fit all my needs (its basically old google before enshitification).
I’ve played with searxng which seems promising but I haven’t given it enough time. But it seems like I might eventually move there.
Tried Startpage a while ago, but was put off but some alleged iffy dealings of the company behind it. Trying SearXNG now and I’m impressed!
What iffy dealings are you referring to? Because they were acquired? They’ve been established, and restablished after being acquired, as being completely privacy focused.
My only criticism is that they don’t always play nice with VPNs.
But yes, SearXNG is a great way to go too.
