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?
The main problem for me is how much DuckDuckGo priorities recency in the results over relevancy
I mostly use startpage, but occasionally ecosia and mojeek.
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.
Try www.nogoo.me
Didn’t know about several of these, cheers!
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.
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.
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.
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 like qwant.com from France. They are using the Bing index but started to collaborate with Ecosia to build their own.
I’ve been using this for about a month now and have been happy with it too
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.
+1, Qwant is awesome
I’ll try qwant!
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.
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 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.
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.
This shit right here!
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. 🙁
Trying it these past days and I’m impressed!
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)
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 use Qwant instead and I’m pretty happy wiith that.
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’ve tried other search engines any times. Despite the worsening google search somehow is still much better than alternatives.
