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?
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I use StartPage because it’s the closest to Google 10+ years ago.
Try www.nogoo.me
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.
Trying it these past days and I’m impressed!
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.
I like SearXNG, you get all of all worlds
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…
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)
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?”
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.
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.
This is unfortunately the same type of experience I’ve had with SearXNG. 🙁
This shit right here!
I’ve tried other search engines any times. Despite the worsening google search somehow is still much better than alternatives.
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
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.
I think in the last few years DDG has been improving and google has been worsening for general searching. Because I have nearly stopped using
!gbefore I used it constantly.I still use google at work as the results there match a bit better.
I use DDG and can’t say I’ve had an uptick in the amount of !g I have to do. The only one recently was for an image search but that’s pretty normal when looking for something obscure.
Don’t have any solutions, but figured another input might be interesting.
It’s very likely to depend on the kinds of searches I do, indeed. Although I think it’s the same as in the previous years. Could also be just a subjective impression, so I’ll try to keep count of how often the “!g” really leads to better results.
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”.
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.
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.
You can find a good Searxng instance or run your own (it can also run on a RPi)
This.
I’m using perennialte.ch, they redirect reddit urls to redlib which is a nice touch.
I went ddg > kagi > searxng and this is the set up I’m happiest with.
I mostly use startpage, but occasionally ecosia and mojeek.
- 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.
Same^2
Duckduckgo gives you Bing results. If you like Microsoft they are up the alley. If not tough luck.
DDG is often but not always a lot worse than Google in my experience.
Been happy with Kagi for the past few months. So far no thoughts of switching back to either Google or DDG.
I’ve definitely felt the enshittification of DDG. A couple of years ago they would start dropping hits related to my location into my search results, even when I had region off and private search by default. That gave me the impression that my IP address was being used and possibly passed on to Bing, but I don’t have the chops to confirm it 🤷
