Which one is yours?

Google Search hasn’t been revolutionary since 2008. Most everyone has all but caught up over a decade ago. The only thing GS has is a monopoly by being the default search. Outside of that, their service is just like all the others (and in some cases worse at returning results).

Well it still is, the web is open to be indexed.
Now paying for a service which has its own index sounds fine, but I personally don't trust this model if the code isn't open source as well (which kind of ties back into freely accessible information), though I can see it being hard to monetize if anyone can host their own version, unless the hardware infrastructure needed was really expensive

Could you tell me what you're on the fence about? I'm down to pay for a search engine to reduce my reliance on Google if it works well. DDG doesn't do great with technical searches all the time

I love the listicles feature. Not because I want to actually look at those results but because they're all stripped out of the main search. Doing product research is so much better without all those low-quality "top whatever 2023" lists that take up the first 3 pages of google lol

There are a lot of options: Bitcoin & Bitcoin lightning via opennode + Paypal, Venmo, iDeal, giropay, & stripe.

Personally I converted some XMR to BTC then paid with that (using a single-use wallet)

I suggest searching the topic online I'm not an expert but I guess that searx makes the researches for you and comunicate the answers back ... so it's at least adding a step in between... Also I heard that DDG was taking a less open and clear politic about privacy witch definitely did help me chose to switch to searx

Why is it a struggle?

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They have their fair share of questionable practices. Most prominent was being in the bed with Micro$$oft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Controversies

I think they messed with search result ranking as well.

I don't know about evil, but my results have been filled with AI generated crap sites lately. I don't know if others are doing any better filtering them out, but it is making me think to look elsewhere besides ddg

Primarily ddg.

Same as using Google

Somewhat, because you’re proxying your searches through ddg, just like with startpage.

Edit: Apparently I'm mistaken, you are accessing google directly with DDG, unlike with startpage where your query goes through them first. I'm a startpage user so I wasn't really aware of how DDG does their bangs.

srry, non-native language :)

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Any sources please?

I have this https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/377-ip-addresses

When communicating your searches to Bing to provide you with results, we never communicate your IP address together with your search queries.

And this : https://www.ecosia.org/privacy

For example, when searching for “tree” on Ecosia we forward the following information to our partner, Bing: IP address (to a separate fraud detection server, so your search term and IP address are never sent to the same server), meta-data on your device that is necessary for the result like screen size, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting.

If you choose to enable “personalised search”, Ecosia sets a Bing-specific “customer ID” parameter to improve the quality of your search results. You can also choose to enable this feature by modifying your user settings.

The search request and IP are sent to separate servers and with different goals.

Mot likely the IP is sent to Bing to detect if it's bot. That way Ecosia can know when to send a captcha.

And the search request is sent by Ecosia without the IP or identifying informations.

DDG also uses Bing, and it's possible to block the XHR connection to Bing in Ecosia.