It’d be great if DDG’s search was actually better rather than just an alternative. I’ve been using DDG for years and I’m still having to use other search engines because DDG’s results aren’t good or it pulls a google and gives you the same results no matter how many different ways you query.
I’ve been using kagi for quite some time and still happy with it.
Obviously not everyone will be willing to pay for search. But at least my data isn’t getting harvested.
+1
kagi has the best search results for me, results are often more relevant than Google’s results. DDG has awful results and I often end up using !g on DDG because I don’t get any relevant results.
DDG is almost all AI slop results now. Even worse than google.
I found Quant and DDG kinda sucky to be honest. I am experimenting with just having Tor open on my second screen with google. Might try Kagi at some point
I use mostly EU search engines without AI (Startpage, Metager, Mojeek…)
After trying basically every search engines (except Bing), I settled on duckduckgo.
funny because i left duckduckgo since it’s littered with AI shit now.
it’s just a metasearch engine for bing anyway and there are about a million of those.
Ddg:
Ran https://voteyesornoai.com/ Where of 175k people, 90% said No AI
Offers noai.duckduckgo.com, presumably to cater to this 90% who don’t want it.
Has AI first features in main product. Does not advertise noai much.
So…
- It’s primary product goes against it’s market research
- It’s pushing AI, not promoting the alternative
- People keep promoting ddg for (2) despite (1)
Just seems weird.
Iirc, they explained it on techlore talks like “it"s X% of those who responded in $site, while many qactual users prefer or don’t oppose it”, or smth of that nature. Also, it appears far less than on google even with constant cookie clearing
I would like to direct the reader to Yacy. It’s a free-software, self-hosted search-engine. Users have the option to peer with other users, creating a larger decentralised search engine.
Build it. Use it. Promote it. Finance it. Bupf it, for short. Build the future you want or piss and moan endlessly.
Cool! Would this be much different then say SearXNG? I know SearXNG relies on google, DDG etc to formulate its searches.
Neat. Reminds me of bitmagnet, which crawls BitTorrent’s DHT to built a searchable index of torrents. It lacks a peer option though.
I ran it for an hour and calculated that it would use over 1TB/month of bandwidth, which is too much for my data cap :(
Part of the problem is that most of these privacy-protecting search engines are just the big search engines re-packaged; DuckDuckGo is Bing, and Startpage is Google. SearchXNG is just an aggregator, and so is Kagi. What we really need are some alternative engines that function as well as Google used to. I would be willing to pay for that, as relying on ads clearly doesn’t work.
Didn’t know that, I’ll give Startpage a try since for me DDG sucks
I don’t mind Google. I’ve been using it to figure out how to build a home made mobility scooter, and it’s working quite well.
I switched because every time I tried to google something on my phone I got literally 10-15 captchas in a row and it was taking so long.
30% growth is great, but that still means google controls, like, 90% of search in absolute numbers?
