I’m still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don’t trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What’s the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?
Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a “default search engine” that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.
Edit 2: Thanks for the recommendation of Kagi. I’m going to roll with it for a while. I see they have an extension for Safari that allows them to hijack the address bar, which is just what I needed.
Duckduckgo and (downvotes incoming) brave search.
And I disagree with you, I don’t know a single browser where you can’t change the default search engine.
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I’m out of the loop on DDG, what did they do?
A long ago they had drama for apparently leaking user information to microsoft— but that was a while ago. Really they were accused of having biased results.
[Edited by the commenter to remove incorrect information, see below.] I’m not sure if anything else has come up since then though, and I’ve continued using DDG, just not for any sort of news or information on current events. I mainly use a search engine for dev stuff anyways.
Apart from that, the results are often pretty terrible unless you use the exact terms from whatever page you’re trying to find. I’ve also seen a lot of people stating that search results keep changing every time they refresh the page as well.
Do you have a source for that?
It’s actually the opposite. The downranked sites they considered Russian propaganda which made a lot free speech enthusiasts mad.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/duckduckgo-russian-disinformation-downranking.html
I think rather than either or, it just ranks things differently and doesn’t give the best results.
I also remember during the height of COVID, antivax people were saying to use DDG because their random blogs and conspiracy YouTube videos were closer to the top compared to google.
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The only thing I can find is they allow MS trackers in their browser. Which isn’t great, but doesn’t matter if you only use their search.
Do you have a source?
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That’s kind of spreading misinformation though right?
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Does anyone have a source?
Probably not, because it’s a lie.
Where does that page state that their claim isn’t true? All it states is “We don’t track you” but it doesn’t say that they don’t allow other companies to track you instead.
I’ve been using DDG, and Ecosia. So I looked to see what was up with DDG. From what I’m reading, I’ll keep using DDG.
May 25, 2022 An article in TechRadar, and another on The Register mention an inability to block Microsoft trackers on DDG.
https://www.techradar.com/news/duckduckgo-in-hot-water-over-hidden-tracking-agreement-with-microsoft
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/25/duckduckgo_browser_microsoft_privacy/August 5, 2022 A TEchCRunch article describes DDG’s efforts to block advertising requests and other tracking protections
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/May 12, 2023 Reuters article “No deal between DuckDuckGo and Microsoft to track users online”
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N3792HE/
“Independent experts say that DuckDuckGo blocks known tracking scripts from loading to prevent vulnerable personal identifiers from being exposed, including Microsoft-owned scripts. A separate partnership with Microsoft for advertising on DuckDuckGo’s search results page is limited to ad placements, not tracking users or building profiles, a DuckDuckGo spokesperson said.”Further, "Users sharing the headline, “Google Lite: DuckDuckGo Signs Secret Deal with Bill Gates to Track Users Online” in April 2023 can be seen (here) and (here).
The headline belonged to a story that first appeared on NewsPunch on May 25, 2022 (here), which now redirects to The People’s Voice (the two are affiliated) (here) (here).
The original article was published before DuckDuckGo eliminated, in August 2022, an exception that did permit some Microsoft-owned tracking scripts on websites to send data to Microsoft."
Links are in the article cited.
I’m still using it but it was fun when they had something along the lines of “your privacy is safe with us. Also, wanna leave your email?” 😅
I am thinking of migrating to Kagi now, because search in DDG is often meh
Not sure on the shady part, but I have stopped using them simply because they give me the same crap as Bing. Web search is almost dead, I’ve been thinking of trying one of the paid options. I’ve read good things about kagi
i don’t get this, i get perfectly fine search results with ddg…
i get finding the results slightly worse but dead? stop it with this absurd hyperbole
Depends what you’re trying to do. Looking up a movie? Easy. Looking up niche documentation/issues or error codes just feels hopeless compared to how it used to be.
i mean i have no real issues finding info about various linux errors, is that not niche enough?
or have i just never seen the glory days where a google search would automatically fix your issue and bake a nice cake?
Free web search gives me a whole page of SEO pages, cached reddit content that’s been deleted when you click it, or one of like five tech giants and their crap.
Unless you are very specific and already know what site you are looking for it is extremely difficult to simply find information now, if you just want an answer you locate the relevant reddit or discord community and try your luck there, or ask a LLM to give you an answer because you can’t wade through the sheer amount of non- and disinformation out there now.
Of course, the LLM is also trained on this bullshit and not actually smart, so at best you get an idea where you can look for the information it regurgitated if you make it cite its sources, and do your own research from there.
Are you really telling me this is somehow not much much worse than mid 2000s-2010s internet, where you typed something into google and it almost always found that exact thing you were looking for?
Surely anecdotal, but I have never clicked on a Google Reddit link that didn’t let me to an actual post, most of the time with the actual info I was hoping to find and never have I been served SEO pages.
There was a slight influx of AI generated nonsense a couple months back but that stopped. On my iPhone i Use DuckDuckGo and an perfectly happy. On the Mac where I have more ways to block stuff I use google and also don’t have any issues.
May I ask what kind of things you usually search for?
I am generally switching between Google and duck duck go on Firefox. When Google gives shitty results (which is frequently) I switch over to ddg.
Been using Qwant for maybe a year or so. Recently found Swisscows too. I am not sure if Qwant uses their own index. I remember that they said that they were to create their own index, but the results looks suspiciously similar to Bing. Swisscows for sure runs their own index, and I find the results to be rather good
if nothing else qwant has a good map, based on openstreetmap but with a vector renderer and with tripadvisor integration so it’s really easy to find restaurants
ecosia, like knowing that my searchs are helping the world a little
You want a free search, Brave. Don’t like brave, then qwant. I use Kagi. It costs money but it is great.
I just make a post in NoStupidQuestions and use y’all like a search engine. :P
I post answers to NoStupidQuestions with most of the keywords you’re looking for and a link to my AI-generated blog. Your move.
Posting a wrong answer is a good way to get the right answer in a reply!
Ah, Murphy’s law
Almost got me!
You’re thinking of Godwin’s Law
Got 'em
SearXNG
I’ve been using qwant for a few weeks and it gives me quite satisfying and accurate results. Before I had been using ecosia for years but the results can be lackluster sometimes. Especially when you search very specific “niche” things (like obscure Linux problems troubleshooting). But I’m still looking for a browser which let’s you pick multiple languages for results.
Meta search engines:
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SearX
Open source, self hostable meta search engine.
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SearXNG
Better version of SearX. A list of SearX and SearXNG instances is available at https://searx.space
Also meta search engines, but different:
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DuckDuckGo
It’s very privacy friendly, but it gets all the search results from Microsoft’s Bing.
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Startpage
Basically the same thing but it uses Google results. They are really focused on privacy too, they even are on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@StartpageSearch
They’re based in the EU (Netherlands) so they are also subject to the GDPR.
Independent:
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Brave Search
They recently stopped using Google and Bing and created their own search index. It appears to be privacy friendly, but the company behind Brave is not ideal.
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Mojeek
A small privacy focused search engine, that uses its own index. They’re also on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@Mojeek
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Kagi
I’ve seen many many people recommend it, but I have never really used it myself. It’s not free, they charge $5/month for 300 searches and $10 for unlimited searches.
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I run a whoogle instance personally
Of what?
Of shit auto correct, whoogle, open source privacy frontend for google
How is an instance a search engine?
Whoogle is a self hosted front end for google. You just run it and it will pass the search to Google and strip all the bullshit out.
Thanks for the info!
https://kagi.com no ads, great results. It’s $5 a month but worth it imo
It’s really good. The price tag is worth it imo as they buy results from a host of other search engines including Google, but the results are actually better.
Seconding. Kagi is the only one that was able to replace Google for me.
I need to try it out. If it’s as good as its reputation implies and stays that way, I’d be $5/mo amount of interested. But I have no idea how many times I’m going to need to search for something per month. Not a fan of that limitation.
You can get 100 searches for free to try it. I’m using it for purchases and technical queries, because the results are hugely less polluted. If I’m searching for, say, a film or a book, I use Google and not one of my paid searches
For the web search I need to do it’s really not worth it. if my job required good web search results to be effective then it would be a different matter but alas I am not a software developer or an analyst…
This is the only true Google replacement I’ve found.
Another option is SearXNG. It’s meta search engine, which means that it aggregates other search engines like Google and Bing but without tracking or logging, because your searches are proxied using a public instance, that will mix your search with the ones from other people.
And about default search engine, don’t know what you’re talking about, both chrome and Firefox allows this, in mobile and desktop.
