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I had been using DDG for years but switched to SearXNG last fall after reading about it on Lemmy. It’s a privacy focused meta-search engine that can even be self-hosted. It’s wildly customizable and I’ve been pretty happy with the results.
If you’re not interested in self-hosting, or just want to test drive it a bit, there are lots of public instances you can use as well.
Man I fucking love this community sometimes. This is like the 5th fantastic self hostable open source software I've seen since joining lemmy, and every time, it gives me that feeling of discovering the internet all over again.
Share the other 4 :)
Yep! I am new to here from Reddit. And holy shit do I love Lemmy! Sooo glad I stopped using reddit and found Lemmy!
I'm clearly not understanding something here, but I thought search engines would require loads of space to index all the internet. Just thinking about the ability to search for code on stackoverflow seems like loads already.
Edit:
Found it!
SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
Looks very interesting, thanks for commenting about it.
I've switched to searx as well.
I added an instance as a custom search on my firefox mobile app using this string.
https://ooglester.com/search?q=%s
Whoa thank you!!!
Ugh. I use DDG for the privacy, because it sure as fuck isn't a good search engine.
There aren't any good search engines anymore, because there isn't a good internet anymore. SOE has buried the internet's wealth of information and centralization starved out all the spaces where information used to be. Hell half the forums that used to appear in search results aren't even online anymore, and live only in the way back machine (which doesn't come up in results).
There's so little to find anymore compared to the halcyon days of search engines we remember.
I do turn to google after failing at DDG and the results are better.
Honestly SearXNG and Brave search are fairly good. I don't think I've ever had to switch to google or some bing clone to search the internet for a very long time
I use DDG for the privacy as well, but personally I think it works better than Google in my field (software development). The only issue I personally have with DDG is that it lags behind Google in terms of updates, I notice when searching for something that came out or happened only recently.
This would be a major issue, because DDG specifically claims it does not store any identifying information about you.
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see that the searches aren’t 100% matching up either.
my guess is this is just variation in the search algorithms over time. excerpt from their privacy policy above which I think can explain most of the variability you mentioned:
"For example, we may know that we got a lot of searches for "cute cat pictures" today, but we don’t know who actually performed those searches. That is, viewing search results on DuckDuckGo is anonymous. And we only save these anonymous search queries — completely disconnected from any unique identifiers like IP addresses — for just enough time to analyze anonymous trends like popular searches, so that we can better serve you. For local search results in particular, we've further engineered a solution to shield your precise location from us and our content providers that sends us a random location nearish to you, which we also never log to disk."
So they do use your geo IP and popular searches to weigh results which can change over time.
Yep.
For the simple response - they group all the searches from your location based on IP, and the results are weighted from that.
So if your town has a airshow on, all the DDG users that search for airshow near you will bump those responses up the weighting scale for all uses in your area. Regardless of you search for it.
The location is very rough, not even the same town. Usually it things I'm in a while different country in Europe
Well. Isn't ddg just a Bing API?
DuckDuckGo is also feeding your search terms into AI development now. I've tried it again recently but prefer Ecosia, at least Ecosia lets me more easily get to Google Maps when I want to, rather than trying to push Apple Maps.
I just usually do !map
Ah I wasn't aware of that shortcut, one of the main reasons DDG wasn't working for me was because I thought I could only do !g and then go to the Google page, and Google had been making it more difficult to go from the main search page to Maps.
Is there a way to get reminded when there's more replies?
Not that I'm aware of. Your best bet is to save the post and come back later, or if you're in a browser leave the tab open in the background.
Not really. Just use the bookmark the page function and go through your bookmarks later.
I noticed today searching that the date search no longer seems to work right. There are some terms that only appeared since 2020 and up until my recent attempts those terms produced no results on DDG when date constrained but now produce terms in articles clearly after that date. I don't know if this is some personalisation nonsense or always pulling but results if the constraints don't match or what but its seriously problematic and means I can't trust the date constraints anymore.
I've been noticing that they've been getting worse and worse myself. I was recommenced Mojeek and Qwant, but I haven't made the switch yet. I always forget to use them instead.
thanks for mentioning us; Qwant also uses Bing (same as DDG) so if they don't have a personal parameter then it should be similar. That being said we (obviously) think people should give Mojeek a go :D
Thanks for letting me know that Qwant is Bing. It's hard as a typical person to find any info on search engines, so I appreciate the heads up.
The local results thing has been a thing for years (for me), it mostly happens when doing a search with few results
I’ve noticed this too. Not only what you stated, but how the search terms aren’t always respected; ie they do similar terms, even if the term or phrase is in quotes (the quotes should mean exact matches only). They also do a lot of filtering of the results if they feel I shouldn’t be seeing them. I can take my same search query from DDG to Google and most of the time find what I’m looking for.
If I understand DDG correctly, they use Microsoft Bing as their backend for search results. So while they may be branded DDG, the results are in fact out of DDG’a control. It also means we are more subject to Microsoft’s privacy policy than we are to DDG’s.
I’ve been wanting to move away from DDG because of these reasons, but have been unable to find good alternatives. Hopefully someone here can make good suggestions.
DDG uses a bunch of different sources, it's not just rebranded bing.
also DDG does not send any personal info to its partners, so Microsoft's privacy policy is not relevant.
OP's concern is that DDG itself is keeping your personal info and using that to weigh your search results. But that also directly contradicts DDG's privacy policy, so it's either a major breach of trust or I think more likely OP is reading into varying search results too much.
The page you link to talks about the search results that come at the top of the page, eg a Wikipedia or Trip Advisor result. The actual search itself comes from Bing, and it's more than likely that the top page banner also is processed via Bing.
Edit: However, the Wikipedia page does provide more detail, which proves you right and my assumption wrong:
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.
I appreciate both your and @acosmichippo@lemmy.world’s responses. I certainly was not aware of the expanded set of results that DDG use. Nor was I aware that they anonymized the queries they send to their search partners.
If I understand DDG correctly, they use Microsoft Bing as their backend for search results. So while they may be branded DDG, the results are in fact out of DDG’a control. It also means we are more subject to Microsoft’s privacy policy than we are to DDG’s.
This is exactly right. DDG is basically a front end that's supposed to strip out identifying information and then submit your request to Microsoft. [Edit:] Apparently they have expanded from this, according to their Wikipedia page. [/E]
However, after seeing TV ads for DDG not that long ago I kind of lost what faith I had left in them. As a rule of thumb, I've never trusted products and services advertised on TV - TV advertising is expensive, and the business expects to make that expense back and then some from their customers.
However, after seeing TV ads for DDG not that long ago I kind of lost what faith I had left in them. As a rule of thumb, I’ve never trusted products and services advertised on TV - TV advertising is expensive, and the business expects to make that expense back and then some from their customers.
DDG doesn't claim to be non-profit or anything. Their business model is based on revenue from advertising targeted solely from the search queries themselves, not from stored personal data.
Startpage has been my go to for a while. Between it and ecosia I can usually find what I'm looking for
@Cataphract Nowadays I just prefer to pay for search to #Kagi
I am tired of Kagi shills everywhere posting how kagi is great :/
As someone who currently uses searxng and kagi, I can say that kagi gives the best results of any general internet search engine. Do I like paying money for it? Of course not. But it will keep getting mentioned as long as it keeps providing the best results.
Customer word of mouth ≠ shills.
Yeah I'm starting to want to change my search engine of choice