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?
  • ZeroCool@lemmy.caEnglish
    601·
    2 days ago

    I haven’t noticed any issues with the quality of DDG results, but if you feel the results are lackluster, 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, apart from the privacy focused aspect of the project, 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.

      • kixik@lemmy.ml
        5·
        2 days ago

        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…

        • sbird@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          2 days ago

          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)

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      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?”

    • adry@piefed.socialEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • lemmeBe@sh.itjust.works
      41·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • ZeroCool@lemmy.caEnglish
        71·
        2 days ago

        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 taste of what it can do but it’s a much better ride when you self-host.