I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few months now and to be honest I’m kind of disappointed. I really appreciate the privacy concerns and the lack of tracking software. It got really annoying how Google would “recommend” things that it thought I was interested in when I wasn’t interested in them, that kind of thing. But on the other hand, I’ve been starting to get really frustrated at just how hard it is to search for anything. You have to be really specific, especially if it’s something niche or if you don’t fully know the right terms to ask for. At least with Google, if you weren’t completely correct about a topic, it could at least parse what hobby or activity you were trying to ask about and bring up things related to that. But with DDG, I’ve found it doesn’t even really try in that regard. Plus it’s frankly really dumb how it uses Apple Maps as opposed to, I dunno? OSM? I honestly prefer Google Maps despite my dislike of the search engine so the usage of Apple Maps is really offputting.
Now, before you say anything, going in I knew it wouldn’t be as easy to search for things as on Google, but I’m pretty experienced with the internet and I didn’t think it would be a problem. But even being hyper-specific yields surprisingly little results if it’s something niche. Even wording it like you would on a University library search engine doesn’t seem to work as good as I might expect.
I’m open to considering more mainstream options too like Bing if it’s better than I remember it being.
edit: I should’ve mentioned, I’m not necessarily saying I want to make a full switch just yet to any daily driver situation, I’d just like some recommendations for when DDG is being DDG and not giving me any relevant results.
I know what you mean. I still use it all the same as my default search, the reason is the bang (!) Operators.
So if the ddg normal search isn’t working, I can add a !g and I get the Google version. Or if I want Google maps… Then I just add !gm
The other one I use a lot is wolfram alpha for unit conversions and calculations, just add a !wa
Hacker news search is !HN
Having this one stop shop for many different search types end up being way better than Google, even if somethimes the regular search may not be so great
+1 for ddg’s bang operators. I use !w for Wikipedia, !gsc for Google scholar, !py for Python docs, !pypi, !imdb, and !tvdb frequently. Here’s a searchable list: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Ok TIL, never knew they were a thing!
What’s the advantage of those over just adding those keywords to the browser’s search bar? I can type “gm anything” in all of my browser, and it will just open Google Maps directly. I don’t understand why people keep calling this a great feature of ddg when you can achieve the same without the detour through ddg.
For me, personally, the advantage is I don’t have to set up all the custom searches myself, there are a lot of them, and you can guess most!
Kagi also has bangs. My muscle memory carried over from ddg so I often forget if I’m using Kagi on my personal device or ddg on my work laptop.
I switched to SearXNG and never looked back since. It’s a meta search engine that encompasses multiple other engines like google, bing, ddg, wikipedia, openstreetmaps and many more. You can always select which engines you want to use and the best is that this tool makes your search anonymous. you have to select a server at searx.space and then you right click the url to make it the default search engine on firefox.
Seconded on Kagi. I’ve been using it for a few months now. Good results and I think it makes sense to pay for search. As the old saying goes “if it’s free online, you are the product”.
I’ve been using Kagi for about a month, and I have to say the searches are excellent! No more wasting time searching through over-SEO’d ad-ridden crap! Just high quality results!
Kagi is well worth the price imo. I never really have to fall back to a different search engine; it’s way better than DDG. It also has lenses that you can customize to really narrow down results to exactly what you need.
Never heard of it before. First thing that came to mind, is, if it’s privacy focused, it’s odd to have to create an account, and give their your credit card, if you are ‘privacy focused’, it sounds like the opposite you’d want.
But they do address those on their site, which is neat. I dunno if I’m ready to switch from Google, tho, worst case, sometimes I ask Bing instead when google’s results are of… questionable quality. I wonder how kagi would fare on those…
I get what you mean, though on the other hand, a company that bills itself as privacy focused and is funded by user payments is (most likely) serving the users with search as the product, and not harvesting minute data from the users in order to serve advertizers with users as the product. Maybe they have your name and credit card, but don’t track and retain anything else? I wouldn’t assume that and would read through their actual terms - I think this could go either way - but I wouldn’t write the whole thing off automatically either.
Edit: could be it’s not unlike paying a VPN/privacy focused email provider like Proton, which supposedly has your payment info (for premium/pro) but not the content of your emails, etc.
agreed I’ve had really good luck with brave for searches and it allows !bangs too
It pulls some of its results from bing. It’s mostly better than google (except for images) so I’m using it for now
I’ve been impressed by how well brave search is on the brave browser
DDG isn’t perfect by a long shot, but it’s still leagues better than google. I think SEO overall has taken a nosedive in recent years, especially with AI written content muddying the waters. Unfortunately I do not know of an alternative that’s better than either.
As a trucking dispatcher I have relied more on Bing Maps because they are more updated than Google maps sometimes. Google maps is almost impossible to search for a specific thing when you’re in a pinch, because there will be an ad for a competitor at the top of the list and you can easily be misled if you are in a rush. Happened to my bf a few weeks ago when he was searching for the closest UPS (near closing time) and inadvertently drove to a FedEx because it was the ad at the top of the search results. By the time he realized his mistake the UPS was closed. Fuck Google.
It’s not that seo has taken a nosedive ( I guess, it does depend on whose perspective ) More like, it’s become such an hyper-focus on it that we have a bunch of seo-driven drivel destroying the quality of the results.
People mostly figured out how google wants things to rank them high. So they do only that. And a lot of it. Anything that doesn’t gets relegated to further down results, or, gasp, the second page. Which means a loss in revenu, so you kinda --have-- to do it, business wise.
I’m a part time delivery person and bing maps is honestly really good, it’s just a shame there’s no mobile app because I’d probably switch to it in a heartbeat. As you said, google maps is really good but it fudges specifics a lot and gives you incorrect directions for certain addresses.
Search engines are about to become almost useless due to GenerativeAI flooding the internet. I don’t know if there’s any possible solution
At least some of the AI spam might start to point me at the solution to my problem, unlike a lot of current “we just put a shitload of this keyword in this listicle that says exactly nothing” SEO garbage.
But yeah. I miss old search that actually worked.
You could have a look at startpage. It is basically a google proxy.
@bermuda @technology Another vote for Searx-NG. I found it pretty easy to set up via docker (although there are some public instances you can use to try it out to see if you like the results).
I’ve been using DDG as a Google replacement for a 3-4 years now. I have to say that my experience in terms of search results has been the opposite of yours. Google’s ads were so prominent and the search results so lacking what I wanted to see, it has become totally useless to me. DDG on the other hand almost always shows me what I’m looking for in the first few results.
Having said that, I’ve been using DDG long enough that perhaps I’m just acclimated to its features and functionality.
https://www.mojeek.com/ is an alternative
I didn’t know that one. Seems like it’s using proprietary technology instead of licensing bing? Might be interesting to see.
SearX
I have no idea what you are talking about. I’ve used ddg for 5+ years and the search rsults have been so much better than the ad hell that google has been to the point that when i have to use a computer that uses google as default search engine i feel like i lost the ability to search stuff.
Since Bing chat was released, I mostly switched to Bing and even there I have to go to Google for about 20% of the searches after Bing not really giving me great search results (in the cases I need to search for things that I don’t want to or can use Bing chat for). So I doubt any privacy-friendly search engine will do a better job.
I have used Qwant in the past, but the search results were just so much worse. That experiment did not last longer than a week.
Oh I totally forgot about Bing chat being a thing. I might have to check that out when I get the chance.
I have used Qwant myself at times.