As asked.
I want to take this time to say DDG is getting worse in the hopes they reverse course if I say it enough times.
They are giving location based results even when location is off. They are putting us in the bubble they based their marketing around being outside of
This is what I use because they take your ad revenue and plant trees. Judge for yourself.
I used to use DDG until they started censoring results.
I use Brave Search and Startpage. The latter is basically just a private Google proxy with some cool features and the former is fully independent, private, aesthetically appealing and has nice optional AI features.
DDG really does censor results hard. They even blocked my list of US atrocities from their search results.
Contributing here with another sample point.
I did not find the mentioned link on either search engines’ first page of results.
DuckDuckGo:
StartPage:
I am not sure why a black bar appears when taking a full page screenshot of StartPage on Safari for iOS, but both screenshots are unedited and uploaded as-is.
Yeah I noticed that, it’s why I don’t really use them. Astroturfed to shit.
EDIT: OMG unrelated but i’m so glad you wrote https://dessalines.github.io/essays/nietzsche.html because I got into arguments on hexbear over that guy being a fascist POS and it’s so vindicating to read someone backing me up on that after all the gaslighting they put me through.
Thx! I have no why some ppl twist their brains in knots trying to defend nietzche. I still come across ppl who read that and try to say he actually meant the opposite.
I know right! And I’m the problematic one for pointing out just how ridiculous that reasoning is.
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
And it was initially founded in 1996!
_Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer_
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
_Source: https://metager.org/lang_
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And other useful features, for example:
That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.
_Source: https://metager.org/tips_
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
DDG has a weird relationship with Microsoft, I wouldn’t use it. I currently pay the Pro plan for Kagi and I’m very satisfied with it.
I have started using Yandex recently and so far, it is decent, but no different than DDG. The minor annoyance I have is that some links and text are in the Russian language.
No one really talks about it and it’s in its infancy, but I’ve really been enjoying Stract.com
I was cheeky and put Lemmy into the “find a website” menu and it listed off a bunch of instances.
If you’ve used Kagi, it has a feature much like “lens” to raise the weight of fediverse results too
I really want to like stract but I can’t get it to give me good results. I typically search for programming related things and it has difficulty pulling up relevant information regarding things like documentation and posts regarding the issue.
That’s fair, I can’t say I’ve daily-driven it yet since I’ve still got my Kagi sub, but I’m thinking of defaulting it on my work computer to put it through its paces. It’s done fairly well with some of my tests, but definitely seems to still be getting refined, I’ve noticed recent information can be difficult to find on it
duckduckgo is a US company and the CEO is the previous founder of The Names Database. i don’t know how anyone trusts it when there are so many EU alternatives
Like for example?
Qwant (france-based), startpage (NL-based), searxng (bunch of host options)
honorary mention to Stract which is currently totally useless because the results are so random, but hopefully in a few years it will be a proper alternative. they are indexing the web from scratch in order to not have to rely on existing data from other search engines (which is why the results are terrible right now lol)
Start page was purchased by an ad company a while back
didn’t know, that sucks
Yes it does. We have almost no options left any more. They all get ventured capitalisted
FUCK ME.
Yeah, there’s no winning
It doesn’t appear to be that bad though
So many yet in a thread asking for names you could name one.
you are right, i should have included them from the start. if you’re interested anyway, then see the replies to my comment
TIL there’s a ton of search engines I’ve never heard of.
Kagi
If you use Mullvad VPN, you have access to their Leta search engine
I didn’t know this. Do you like it?
It’s a proxy for Google, so it’s the same search results that you would get on Google.
Duck duck go is my 2nd lol. SearX is my first.
Why?
Duckduckgo doesn’t remove microsoft’s trackers. We really need a good search engine out here, searx is the best I’ve found.
How would you say it compares to old Google?
Seems to be ok enough. Honestly imo better since google most often serves bullshit instead of answers these days.
I recommend startpage.com over duckduckgo. It provides at least the same privacy as DDG while having generally better results because it uses google’s results instead of bing’s.
Start page was purchased by an ad company a while ago
this would change everything. you know more details about this one?
This was over 4 years ago now.
If you use your search engine of choice that isnt owned by an ad company (lol) there are a bunch of results for it.
Here’s one to get you started
deleted by creator
Startpage is owned by a advertising company and closed source. wouldnt really recommend it
With all the SEO garbage, are G**gle results still relevant? I haven’t used it in years for anything serious.
It doesn’t appear to be down:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=test&ia=webIt could be a regional outage. Something like duckduckgo isn’t going to be run from a single location so the individual experiences are going to vary.
