Time to ditch #duckduckgo
Time to ditch #duckduckgo
In the last couple of months I have noticed an increasing trend of supplying me search results that are completely unrelated to the current query and tie back to my location or previous searches. I can say this with a high degree of certainty this is without a doubt beyond the 100th instance this has happened.
My browser is configured against tracking and fingerprinting (in fact all my devices are) which would make it fairly difficult to retain any data unless they are profiling me.
I've also noticed that if you do a search, click a result, then hit back to go back to the results they manipulate the results in some weird way so they're not the exact same results you got the first time. Infuriating
98This is the new quantum search feature: you changed the results by observing them.
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Yes! I thought I was losing my mind. I was like "I swear this was the third result but now it's the 5th? Eh, maybe it was the 5th."
27Ducks are learning to gaslight people. Fascinating.
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Yeah I hate that. Now all results have to be opened in new tabs just in case.
8I'd bet that's more bug than feature. Like they're trying to avoid SEO providing any consistent ordering to be gamed.
Still a pain in the ass either way. Vindication for being a complete tab whore.
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Odd. I wonder what is going on here because when I search that exact same query I get accurate results.
I’ve had iffy search results before but never anything that bad.
47I also don’t get the same results. I also have tracking and fingerprinting disabled everywhere.
16I also returned totally accurate results using the exact same query. I would really like to know what is going on here. This is a common complaint with some people using DDG, that the results are poor, but I consistently have as good if not better results than using Google.
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great. i finally get off google and now duckduckgo is bad. i hate the internet.
38Try this one: https://searxng.no-logs.com/
5Kagi was my favorite but their pricing model is a little too high still. If it was $5 for 500 searches I would do that but the unlimited for $10 is just a bit too high for me.
2I get that not everyone has extra cash to spend. I'm very fortunate to be able to throw $10 at a problem. I don't begrudge you if you need to save cash (I have no kids to raise, for example). But I think $10 is fair if you search a bunch. Maybe I'm overvaluing it; I have heard great things about Kagi, but I'm still fucking around on Google cause it's "good enough," even though it's in great decline. Fuck it, I'm a hypocrite.
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It has been doing this shit for a while. Returning results based on just one key word out of many keywords from my query.
Lately they have been even ignoring the restrictive +"keyword" syntax and returning whatever shit just so they won't admit their (or Microsoft's indexer) is shit
29It's not the fact that there are filler results that bothers me, after all there might not be results for everything we may possibly search.
It's the fact that these are links to services which have a tie to my unique identifiers which I deliberately declined access to in all available ways!
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What would we suggest as a realistic alternative? Sears? Startpage? Brave? (I am no expert by the way, just looking for tips)
22I just switched to using Kagi recently and I like it a lot so far! Theres a free tier for 100/searches a month you can use to figure out if you like it.
24Me too. I was so reluctant to pay for a search engine at first since there are good alternatives out there I don't have to pay for. But I just at least wanted to try the first 100 free searches and was blown away by how great it is. It has some unique features like prioritizing or blocking specific domains, lenses and custom bangs. I payed the $10 the same day for Pro tier and 5 days later (yesterday) I even upgraded to Ultimate tier with ChatGPT-4 (called Kagi Assistant). I really, really enjoy Kagi so far. Most probably it's gonna be my one and only search engine for the next years to come.
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Searx sucks for images in my experience, startpage was bought by an advertising company, brave is weird for a multitude of reasons but I don't know how good their search engine is as I've never tried it
However I do think that finding a searx instance that works for you and then using another engine like ddg for images is the way to go... You could add a shortcut like ".ddg garbage truck" for easily searching with for example ddg on firefox
23I've been using metager for some while and really like it. They're also part of an initiative pushing for a free as in freedom search index, so that's nice
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Try kagi.com
I you have to pay for it, but t's amazing
18I'll take the trial sometime and see if I should drop the cents
7Thanks for mentioning Kagi! I've been looking for some Google/DDG replacement but every single one I've tried had some sort of dealbreaking drawback for me. Google collects all my data and heavily filters my results, DDG provides dogshit results most of the time I don't even bother using it, Startpage is awfully slow, and I didn't even get to understand what Searx is as looking for it led me to some random ugly pages.
Subbed for 1 year 10 bucks plan. Works super-fast on mobile too. Hell yeah!
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I get the same shit at work where I can't use a VPN: like 7-8 relevant results then basically just ads for local businesses after that.
17I have searx, and i'm feeling like a god of search, better than google, better that bingbinggo, and anything else Although I had a lot of problems with it when I was hosting it on a RPI and docker, now i'm not, and it's just so much better
15What was the problem with Docker? I want to host it myself, the docker option seems to be the easiest one.
5I'd guess the RPI part would be the bigger issue.
4Docker by itself is not a good thing, bad with security, not entirely open source, buggy networking, not very reproducible
The problem with docker was timeout for requests, not sure whose falt it was, but the reverse proxy container was unresponsive pretty often
Also, yeah, RPI was not really fast too, it had 8gb ram, boot from ssd Just right now I have i9 with 64gb ram, and this is stupid fast, and actually for most of the apps the performance bump is like 50%
About docker, really, try to look into nixos, it has a really steep learning curve, but it will worth it, and you will be able to do magic
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15It does though? Right under the search bar there should be a switch bar to turn on localized search, and a dropdown to pick different location.
Or is it itself location locked?
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I have still the same good results in ddg, no matter what device or browser. I have noticed that they have some location bias when ddg (and any other search engine i have tried) has non good results globaly but good resulta locally.
Still better then anything i have tested. Just because there are minor anomalies i will stick with them.
15As someone who is a data hoarder/curator and dives into the deep ends of web abyss, I use Searx, Startpage and Yandex. I do not mind Startpage only because I no longer use search engines that much anymore. If something truly needs to be searched, Yandex is the absolute, untouchable king for web, image and reverse image searching, and is better than Google for privacy (very low bar but > Google/Bing).
Searx usually does deliver for the common use cases, and Startpage gives Google results minus SEO and sponsored trash.
If I were to rank them for results based on years of experience, Yandex is easily a 10 (ignoring its unbeatable image search), Searx with "default/all" language results a 7, Startpage a 5 (censors Russian/Chinese sources since it is based on Google), Qwant probably 3.5-4 (unavailable in many regions), Google 3, DDG and Bing 2. I am not sure how Metager, Mojeek and Kagi fare, but they probably perform somewhere between Searx with "default/all" language results and DDG.
Why Yandex is so above Searx metasearch is because its indexing is a lot faster than once a day, besides giving the experience of what Google was around 2009/10 and with no SEO crap. You will find the most obscure personal blog and website there, and DMCA bullshit does not work in Russia, which would work on any of these other search engines or metasearch instance owners.
12On DDG I can type in an exact company or product name and not get a proper result, it's crazy. Google seems to find the stuff no problem, it's really quite frustrating when the search engine isn't even capable of basic queries.
12Yes, I have the same issue with DDG for something like a year now. I can't use it anymore for basic searches, I feel like the bing api they are using is getting worse and worse.
11If you’re looking for a new search engine, I’ve been using paid search provider, Kagi.com, for the last few months. They’ve been great.
11Slowly but surely I am coming to the realisation that free services sooner or later will drift away from their privacy claims
17Precisely. Ad and user data supported products will always balance making their users happy, with making their paying customers happy.
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Pricing seems a bit odd to me What happens if you don't spend all your searches? Does it carry over to next month?
Wouldn't it be better to pay as you go? Without the monthly requirements if they gonna have a limit anyway.
7Kagi is awesome! I recently fell in love with it.
4Same! Switched over to kagi a couple months ago and I've been loving it!
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I paid for Kagi and have been super happy with it. If you don't mind paying, I highly recommend it. Not having ads or manipulated results is worth it for me.
9I feel like ddg has never had good search results
9Same here. Every time I ditch Google and go to ddg, I just laugh how irrelevant all the results are and I continue feeding Google with personal data and telemetry and whatnot.
It is true that even Google's results feel much worse than before but it's still significantly better than ddg.
8Not for me – if DDG is trash, Google is actually unusable.
11Me neither. Even Bing is better than google nowadays.
Also, when it comes to piracy, google basically blocks every relevant result.
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I turned JS off other than for specific websites. This includes DDG. It gives me accurate results, although the other commenters don't seem be facing your problem either
8It might be blindly searching for websites that contain any of the words scan, mark 2, pro.
It seems to do that when it can't find a page with all of the words, and the only way I know to fix it is put the whole thing in quotation marks.
5I feel like Qwant has become the best when it comes to the quality of the search results. My experience with kagi is limited, though.
5The only time I use ddg is to find conspiracy sites to add to the blocklist I maintain. All the trash rises to the top in that search engine. It's rubbish.
4Tell me more...
Do you maintain the block list to avoid conspiracies or because these types of websites are riddled with nasties?
4Mostly to avoid conspiracies. The intended users are people who want to protect vulnerable family members.
Another purpose is to demonstrate that the big social networks could get rid of disinformation if they wanted to - "look what 1 person can achieve, in their spare time", kinda thing.
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No shit in my experience its also filled with random ad stuff and mainly companies selling you shit
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My browser (Firefox) is configured the same way.
No issues with your search term here. I think you have gremlins.
4That is Google, not DuckDuckGo?
3I'm on ddg and get no such issues with the same query:
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4Looks like you are using Firefox. Use arkenfox sure, but cut Mozilla off it's 115 server network it uses to track you via FF by using a host deny list, FOSS git clone harden-firefox. You'll have to disable to update ublock origin or remove the extensions line, but it's better to just cut the adverts and tracking by removing it from the networks than by browser interception (slower, loss of performance, still hits your computer). Links included to do that in that repo.
Alternative browers are Librewolf and Qutebrowser. When you really don't want to be tracked for some things use Lynx.
A great search engine replacement is Grasp. It's being funded by Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator and although you only get 100 free searches a months, it can come in very handy. The search results it gives you, unlike Kagi which is just a reformat of DuckDuckgo yet with AI, it's results are completely different than any other engine and imo, on point, surely for anything technical.
My general search engine is an envs.net free hosting of Searx. envs.net is a free Linux shell community with many services like blogs, email, matrix hosting, etc etc. If you do end up using their German Searx as main search donate to them, I did.
3I use DDG, tho' it's with a VPN. And it seems to work just fine. shrug
3Kagi!!! It's cost money but it's cheap. If you do alot of searches it's worth it
3I tried Kagi and canceled after a week. It's a reformat of DuckDuckGo, a better format for sure, and lack of sponsored links, yet it adds AI too. In the end, it's the same old curated unhelpful results that leave millions of high value boutique and indie sources of information out. Also, it's Orion browser is bad.
Basically ask yourself that knowing all the good writers, content creators went to Substack, yet hardly any search engine gives results from there, why?
1There isn't going to be a search engine without some type of ai or content agitation tool. Key word search is not enough to make one of these work. Search engines need to sort through millions of web pages, and try to give you the best match for what your looking for via smart algorithms. With Google these algorithms are designed to sell you products and get the most clicks out of you. Kagis profit incentive is to curate good links for your search results. Indie results will always be low on the ranks thats why they are indie. As they get more popular so so their search results. You don't want your search engine feeding you only new and up and coming shit. You want the most relevant search results. Sometimes it's going to take some digging to find what your looking for. UNLESS you want to give up mountains of your data to and hope that the company uses it to serve your interest instead of feed you sponsored bullshit.
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Working fine here. OP are you sure it’s not your network?
3I am running OpenWRT and forcing DNS traffic to Mullvad with a fallback to Quad9, besides this happens across different networks.
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2This was first page. Around 10-15 mark.
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Try ddg lite
2I've never seen the point of this search engine or any commercial alternative to google. It's all just varying layers of proxy to Google. You might as well just find a searx instance and use that because it's all the same crap at the end of the day.
1Huh? I thought duckduckgo maintained its own index?
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Nah it's still the best
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