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 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
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’ll try qwant!
I’ve been using this for about a month now and have been happy with it too
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
This is unfortunately the same type of experience I’ve had with SearXNG. 🙁
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.
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.
Trying it these past days and I’m impressed!
This shit right here!
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’ve tried other search engines any times. Despite the worsening google search somehow is still much better than alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🤷
i have noticed that i get fewer results from ddg lately, and local (server-side geoip driven) and totally irrelevant shit frequently thrown in starting below the fold on page 1.
but ddg has been my go-to for years. and very rarely do i need to look elsewhere for a different ‘perspective’–picking from the others configured in my browser: ecosia, startpage, qwant, mojeek. i have a couple instances of self-hostable meta engines in there too, but those are too unreliable to count on for regular use.
Btw https://mwmbl.org/ is an interesting project, although not usable yet
Crawling is not really the elephant in the room, really. The issue is ranking and I don’t see how they plan to address that for having good quality
you can search through brave or google using mullvads leta:
I use it all the time, just wish they had an image search tab. That’s the only thing I switch search engines for now.
The vast majority of the quality comes from the result ranking (that is what people generally refer as indexes albeit indexes are slightly different conceptually). In practice there are two main indexes/ranking (a) Google (b) Bing. DDG, Ecosia, yahoo are, at best, tuning the ranking (not sure if they make things better or worse with that).
This is the reason if you want meaningfully better quality you need searXNG. Because combining results from multiple search engines you grt both main indexes.
There is a ranking/quality problem there as well because how do you join the results of multiple search engines? I think it simply uses a “voting” system where it bumps the results from most search engines. This also means that you want a “balanced” number of search engines based on Google and Bing otherwise you’ll get mainly Google or mainly bing results. Or you may just enable only Google and Bing, really 🤷♂️
If there will be new indexes (e.g. the new European one) you may want to enable them as well but this kind of problems take time to become competitive with giants like Google and Bing (albeit with enshittification this gap is being reduced)
Didn’t know about several of these, cheers!
