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?
  • monovergent@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    Maybe I search for weird things, but my major gripe with DDG is that its autocorrect is way too aggressive. But SearXNG public instances work for me 99% of the time.

  • corgi@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Been happy with Kagi for the past few months. So far no thoughts of switching back to either Google or DDG.

  • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • stravanasu@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Commiunism@beehaw.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    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”.

    • stravanasu@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Commiunism@beehaw.org
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • EnsignWashout@startrek.website
    0·
    1 year ago
    • 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.

  • theblips@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    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

    • stravanasu@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • theblips@lemm.ee
        0·
        1 year ago

        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

    • theblips@lemm.ee
      01·
      1 year ago

      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

  • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.