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?
  • @diffusive@lemmy.world
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    020 days ago

    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)

  • @UltraMasculine@sopuli.xyz
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    20 days ago

    DuckDuckGo/Bing is pretty bad at finding stuff in my native language. That’s why I use Startpage (and sometimes even Google) more nowadays.

  • @Commiunism@beehaw.org
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    020 days 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”.

    • stravanasuOP
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      020 days 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
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        020 days 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.

    • 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.

  • 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

  • @ZeroCool@lemmy.ca
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    20 days ago

    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.

    • fmstrat
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      20 days ago

      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?”

    • @lemmeBe@sh.itjust.works
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      020 days ago

      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.

      • @ZeroCool@lemmy.ca
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        020 days ago

        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.

    • adry
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      020 days ago

      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.

    • sbird
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      020 days ago

      I like SearXNG, you get all of all worlds

      • @kixik@lemmy.ml
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        020 days ago

        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…

        • sbird
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          020 days ago

          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)

  • Alas Poor Erinaceus
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    020 days ago

    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.

    • stravanasuOP
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      020 days ago

      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.

      • @ZeroCool@lemmy.ca
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        20 days ago

        For what it’s worth, Mullvad recently opened up Leta to people without Mullvad VPN accounts. It a google/brave search proxy so pretty much what Startpage claims to do, but I trust Mullvad to actually respect my privacy more than I do Startpage.

        • @Unmapped@lemmy.ml
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          020 days ago

          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.

          • @ZeroCool@lemmy.ca
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            020 days ago

            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.

            • @KnightontheSun@lemmy.world
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              020 days ago

              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.

  • @radamant@lemmy.world
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    020 days ago

    I’ve tried other search engines any times. Despite the worsening google search somehow is still much better than alternatives.

  • @hohoho@lemmy.world
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    020 days ago

    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

    • stravanasuOP
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      020 days ago

      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.