Been looking for a search engine that isn’t plauged with SEO garbage every time I look for anything. Been using DDG for quite a long time now, and I’m starting to get dissatisfied with results. It seems like more and more results are just companies trying to make their way to the top of the search results instead of anything organic. It’s even worse when I look for any kind of service or product.

Looking for as close to 100% organic results as possible.

  •  cerement   ( @cerement@slrpnk.net ) 
    9•1 year ago
    • so yeah, Google is Google, the very definition of SEO – to the point now they will completely ignore your query to show you “relevant” results
    • and Bing is Microsoft, ’nuff said – although I hear they seem to be THE choice for porn searches …
    • people have been claiming DuckDuckGo has become just a frontend for Bing which is why their results have been declining 🤷
    • ad tech company System1 owns a majority stake of Startpage – apparently they’ve mollified PrivacyTools that it would not impact Startpage’s privacy focused mission
    • Qwant out of France actually seems to be stepping up as a good netizen, not only focusing on privacy but also investing in privacy initiatives in EU
    • otherwise you’re stuck bouncing around SearX SearXNG instances – Google and Bing REALLY don’t like meta search engines and will regularly block overactive instances

    EDIT: looks like SearX is pretty much dead and had been replaced by SearXNG

    •  V ‎ ‎   ( @vanderbilt@beehaw.org ) 
      3•1 year ago

      These points seem to mirror my experience for the most part. DuckDuckGo has also been going downhill because certain search modifiers don’t work anymore. Microsoft raised the price of API queries which in turn made it too expensive for DuckDuckGo to maintain certain ones. I mostly enjoyed it because it gives you access to Bing’s search results without the user-hostile UX garbage Microsoft loves to put on all its products. These days I’m using Kagi. It’s been about six months now and I’m really enjoying it.