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?
I use Qwant instead and I’m pretty happy wiith that.
Qwant aparrently aren’t very private
Been happy with Kagi for the past few months. So far no thoughts of switching back to either Google or DDG.
I use StartPage because it’s the closest to Google 10+ years ago.
True about the good old-Google feeling! I want to find how much about of the shadiness claims about Startpage have been substantiated or denied.
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)
Thank you for the explanation about rankings, and the SearXNG suggestion. I’m trying it now and it looks promising!
(Oh and of course if you don’t want to self host and you don’t want your queries to be proxies by random Joe with the public instances, go for the engine you want to “donate” your attention to. I would go for Ecosia just because they seem the most ethical of all, including DDG…. But your choice)
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
Forgot to mention that it unfortunately is a US-owned company, so it would be off the table for the full-on US boycott crowd, especially because it’s a paid service.
Though they seem to be a genuinely good company that consistenly provides good customer support and improves the product in tangible ways. Privacy Pass was implemented because of customer feedback, for example, and so were crypto payments, and both were publicly discussed on the forums with good transparency. They also actively promote the decentralization of the internet: with that Small Web feature I mentioned, with Fediverse and Usenet Archives search being implemented by default, by providing an interface to use any LLM model through their assistant… So I wouldn’t want to boycott them, and I don’t
Didn’t know about several of these, cheers!
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.
I run my own instance of SearX. Very reliable.
Just setup my own instance! Happy so far!
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.
I didn’t know about this – that may explain the problem.
I mostly use startpage, but occasionally ecosia and mojeek.
Searx is good enough if you set up plenty of engines - I do look up quite a lot of stuff and not once in the past 3 months did I go “yeah I need to use google for this”.
I’m trying SearX today, after so many recommended it. It looks promising! Thank you for pointing out the multiple-engines setup.
One possible drawback: it seems I can’t do “verbatim” searches; or at least, quotation marks don’t seem to lead to verbatim searches – I’ll try with “+”. DDG was adamant with quotation marks, that’s something I liked a lot about it.
Interesting, verbatim searches work perfectly for me. Maybe it’s some search engine that doesn’t support them? I personally have bing/google/duckduckgo selected.
No, I stand corrected: the summary/snippet wasn’t showing some of the quoted search words, but the page had all of them. Well done SearXNG.
I use DDG and can’t say I’ve had an uptick in the amount of !g I have to do. The only one recently was for an image search but that’s pretty normal when looking for something obscure.
Don’t have any solutions, but figured another input might be interesting.
It’s very likely to depend on the kinds of searches I do, indeed. Although I think it’s the same as in the previous years. Could also be just a subjective impression, so I’ll try to keep count of how often the “!g” really leads to better results.
- 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
DuckDuckGo/Bing is pretty bad at finding stuff in my native language. That’s why I use Startpage (and sometimes even Google) more nowadays.
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.
Nice initiative besides the search service! Thanks for sharing.
