This is a copy/pasted message I wrote up on another thread. As long as there are people in the comments shilling kagi, I will shill my prefered engines. At least my suggestions will bring awareness to free as in freedom projects. I hope to god people paying 10$/month just to not get datacucked by search engines will also learn something and save their money.
SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.
I personally trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, whos server is located on the other side of the planet, with my query info over Google/Alphabet any day.
Its nice to be able to email and have a human conversation with your search engine provider thats just a knowlegable every day joe who genuinely believes in the project and freely dedicates their resources to it. Consider sending some cash their way to help with upkeep if you like the services they provide, they will probably appreciate and make use of that 10$ better than kagi.
Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn’t seem to give good results try a few others.
Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query
search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won’t index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you. Its also open source and self-hostable
Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses peer-to-peer technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to both run their own local instance and help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets.
They have a public instance available through a web portal. To be upfront, YaCy is not a great search engine for what most people usually want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But, it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine looks like untainted by SEO scores or corporate money-making shenanigans.
I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I know these options are so unknown to most people.
Thank you! So I can use Google but stop it from doing the CAPCHA shit repeatedly because it detects my VPN? It’s abuse of the user and I’m tired of it.
Yup! Enjoy :)
I rage quit Google search the other day over that damn captcha
I’m trying Startpage until I get those alternatives down
I’m sure that’s what Google wants. You can either give them your data or you can go somewhere else, but hopefully you choose to give them your data because they make it too inconvenient not to.
Abuse of the user 🤣
Have you seen users privacy settings? They want their data to be harvested. Now come here and let me give you some sponsored content.
I use Kagi right now but search.marginalia.nu and YaCy seem really cool. Hell, I might package YaCy and write a module for it for NixOS :^)
I’m trying Kagi now but I’m having mixed feelings. Search results are mixed at best for some pretty commonplace topics (e.g. Starfield quests or breaking news).
Also, the search limit (for the trial and basic plans) stresses me and I find myself second guessing whether I really need to search for something. I like it but I haven’t come across a “wow!” moment that makes me want to abandon DDG, despite the transparency and privacy-focus.
what transparency and “privacy focus” are you talking about?
They haven’t released a single line of code and they required you to be logged in, which makes you uniquely identifiable, and if you paid using credit card, then you gave away your personal identifiable information.
datacucked
uuuuusing it
I don’t mind you suggesting these, they’re cool projects, but the “coMmEnTs sHiLLinG kAgI” and “mAke UsE of tHat 10$ beTteR thAn KaGi” stuff is so unnecessary. I mean just… why?
I have a bad habit of mixing personal bias into things when I get into a passionate writing fit and it sometimes comes off as pretentious dickery. I never set out to attack kagi users themselves even if I can now see now it did come across and those comments were unneeded. I was being a pretentious jerk with those comments and apologize to all you kagi users for my assholery.
I do think its a waste to spend money on a search engine, and that open source software instance maintainers could probably make use that $ better than another search engine startup. I am being honest with those personal opinions. But its not my place to judge those who decide they are in a well enough financial spot to pay $ for a service that adds precieved value to their life or where they decide to pay it to.
Its fustrating as a FOSS nerd to see so many people shill yet another subscription based service feeding money into another souless company that makes promises of protecting your data and not selling it to ad companies now but has no gaurentee of holding those promises over time. That’s how the subscription services get you once they have you, slowly changing promises and creeping in their money making bs but slowly enough to not be too jarring. Maybe I’m just disillusioned with things after being burned so many times. Best of luck to you though I hope it continues to be a valuable service to those willing to pay for it.
Thank you! I’m intrigued by Kagi but it’s a lot of money. I’ve tried SearXNG before it wasn’t great for me, I’ll try it again.
I hope you find more success with it this time. Like I said not all SearXNG instances are equal paulgo.io was the first to really click with me and give useful results. Some SearXNG instances won’t query google or most other engines making their usefulness rather limited. Also the more popular an instance becomes the more likely it will be rate-limited by search engines which isn’t the fault of the instance but can be an occasional annoyance for sure. Not perfect solution by any means but I think SearX would be a great fit for lots of people here who just want google results without all the spyware ad bs
Nice choice of lemmy instance, btw. Pubnixes like SDF rule!
Genuine question, what happens to SearX if google pulls the plug on API access or changes the algorithm in a way that makes it worse?
If Kagi got an actual code audit done I would be a lot more on board with it. The audit they do show appears to just be penetration testing, not focused on the code itself but I don’t know much about so maybe there is more to it that I don’t understand.
I wish it were easier for developers to monetize their projects while leaving them open source. Tutanota is a good example of open source code used in a paid service. With tutanota however it seems like what you pay for is the service, not the software.
I am not the most knowledgeable person on searxng innerworkings so may be wrong, but searxng instances usually use the ‘get’ and ‘post’ commands to request+fetch http/https content not an API key. You can get your own api keys/tokens from google and plug them in to searx in the preferences menu if they ever make it API only. There’s a lot of IT academic research that relies on google they will most likely never pull API access fullstop but you never you I guess.
There is not much if anything SearXNG instances can do if google changes algorithm. In worst case scenario it can still index other search engines which themselves scrape google like startpage or engines completely independent like duckduckgo, bing, brave, YaCy, ect. Here is a list of all configured engines SearXNG uses by default you can go into preferences at top right of searXNG to configure what engines you want to use among other things.
It just worries me that there isn’t really a google competitor if all the alternatives rely on google not screwing up a product. It seems like honest search results are becoming less of a thing they care about.
I don’t know what the fuck is going on with Kagi on Lemmy. They must be using bots or paying people for promoting them. I just don’t get how people can trust them so much when they haven’t released the code for anything, they require you to be logged in which makes the user uniquely identifiable and therefore could easily correlate your searches to your identity (even if they claim not to, it’s just a “trust me, bro”)
What is a kagi
Yeah it’s ridiculous, seems like there’s a shill army of this proprietary service here.
When you need a scalable service for tons of users, federated isn’t going to cut it. This is why Apple wants DDG. Point the bajillion crApple lusers at one of your public instances (or even all of them chosen at random each time) and watch it crash and burn overnight. DDG has tons of servers and the infrastructure to hold up while a ton of people search why their luxury device is slowing down every time Apple releases a new one.
shilling kagi
Shilling means that you’re claiming people (like me) who’ve been recommending Kagi are in fact secretly paid to do covert advertising.
Are you using that word wrong, or do you actually believe that we’re all liars?
My issue with SearXNG is that I cannot natively use it on mobile (iOS). Might be a small issue for most but I need to be able to type into my browser’s search bar and it utilize that search engine. Open browser > navigate to search homepage > enter query is a lot slower, especially if I am out and about and need information quickly.
If there is some way to configure this I’d love to hear about it, but Safari on iOS limits you to a handful of search engines. I use DDG today.
I did a quick search and found instructions to what I think you are asking for hopefully this helps. The query string for paulgo.io is “https://paulgo.io/search?q=”
I have also heard Xsearch works
searchengine.party also has the query string links for a multitude of different search engines, as well as a comparison of security tests and privacy policies and other functions
Hey just to update I heard XSearch works if that other thing didn’t work out
thank you, great post
Saved. Thank you for your time and thoroughness!
Thanks Yacy looks promising
You’re welcome updated the comment with proper links
Would also recommend whoogle. They have done public ones iirc but also hand a self hosted option (that I use behind a VPN) for those that line self hosted shit
i have tried these alternate search engines and I have to always come back to google. A friend I trust a lot swears that kagi is the best search engine, and so do other people I know, so it must have some merit.
Wow, USB-C and DDG in the same year? Look at Apple trying to stay relevant 😉
They didn’t switch to USB-C out of the goodness of their hearts. They switched because the EU passed a new law that requires that new smartphones have USB-C ports.
And they actively fought against it for as long as they could, tooth and nail.
It’s an uphill battle, why would Apple bother when just using USB-C makes sense and saves them their lawyers sanity?
Money.
Now that USB-C is the required cable, people can go out and buy any cheap cable they want. The law turned a proprietary cash cow into a low return commodity item.
This argument always cracks me up. I have been able to buy cheap lightning cables effectively since they started making lightning cables lol. It’s not like Apple somehow locks the phone from charging, physics is still a real thing and electricity can still flow through them, even without the MFi aspects.
If you wanna hate Apple for being a massively bloated and money-hungry corporate nightmare, that’s fine, I’m with it, but do we really all think they made it to $3 trillion valuation on… fucking cables??? 😂
No, they made it to 3 trillion with cables, overpriced PCs, overpriced notebooks, overpriced Phones, overpriced watches, and locking software of all these so the easiest way to use different devices together, is to use another apple product.
Oh, and cultivating a fan base of people who uncritically buy anything they make with the notion that it’s “better than anything else” when in reality that could not be further from the truth.
Ok, so you listed basically all of their business strategies, which is exactly my point. It’s not a business built SOLELY on proprietary ports and cables, yet that aspect is what gets the most attention and criticism.
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Yeah but there has to be some reason they were so opposed to this. I don’t get it either though.
Yeah but there has to be some reason they were so opposed to this.
Because Lightning came out years before USB-C was ready and is already an established de facto standard. There are well over a billion devices in use right now with Lightning ports on them, and billions of Lightning cables. You’re balancing the advantages of switching to a “standard” against the reality that their customers already have Lightning stuff. I went several years with my Switch as literally the only thing I owned that used USB-C. Even now it’s still common for gadgets to ship with micro-USB. USB-C has taken a long time to reach real ubiquity.
Lightning is also physically smaller and easier to plug in than USB-C.
Anyway, the point is that USB-C was not (and is not) this significantly, obviously superior experience for Apple’s existing customers. There are real, tangible downsides that make it more expensive and more environmentally wasteful for at least hundreds of millions of iPhone users who will be upgrading.
Apple wants to keep selling overpriced cables to losers.
If they were really fighting it that hard they could’ve stalled till 2025 when the EU law actually takes effect.
Nah, the design specs for phones like this are done years in advance.
So wait…. Are you suggesting they were already planing to switch before the EU law was passed?
They could have, but I think they saw the demand and speculation of a usb-c phone. Maybe they realized that the bad image it would give them if they held out.
I’ve been waiting for a usb-c phone to upgrade. I’m at a point now that I really can’t wait any longer for a new phone. If they did not release a usb-c phone this year, I would have just bought the cheapest phone they offered.
Why keep giving money to Apple if you are already aware of their tactics?
If the choice is paying unreasonable prices for Apple’s overpriced proprietary nonsense or reducing my yield as another data cow in Alphabet’s surveillance capitalism human farming machine, I begrudgingly pick the former.
I think it’s safe to assume all corporations publicly traded are equally greedy, regardless of how much their marketing department assures us that they exist for altruism.
Shareholders don’t by stock to make the world a better place, they invest in the companies sending the largest dividend checks. Apple and Alphabet are equally covetous of our money (money and data for Alphabet), but I trust the old business model of selling hardware more than giving up my data forever to be used for anything in the future.
GrapheneOS is my true preference currently for personal use and it feels good to leave a corporation in favor of a community, much like my switch from Reddit to Lemmy. As the techie in my family and friend group I’m still going to have to recommend iOS to most people since using GrapheneOS as a daily driver is a big ask for my grandmother.
I have to give graphene a try next year.
Same reason that people stick with Google.
After years in the eco-system it is obnoxious to swap, and the other main competitor isn’t any better of a company to deal with.
At least with Android I have options. Do I want USB-C? There’s a phone for that. Do I not want USB-C (for some weird reason)? There’s a phone for that.
Apple will never do anything for any other reasons besides: regulation and profit. They try and foster this image of humanitarianism and ethics, but meanwhile they build everything in sweatshops and make their own “standards” so that their loyal customers can only use the functions they need by purchasing additional dongles.
I’m happy that they were forced into an actual standard, but I’ve already heard at least two apple users IRL claiming that USB-C is inferior for [insert random reasoning here]. Apple has cultivated the idea that they are above standards for a long time and it will take a long time to break.
You mean, just like every company that exists?
Apple is a corporation with a market cap that rivals the GDP of France and a net income that rivals the GDP of Qatar. That much capital consolidated within a singular private entity doesn’t just make them any other company. Their profit seeking is wildly, wildly different than a vast majority of any other company today.
Get your head out of your ass. ALL companies will never do anything for any other reason besides profit. The size of said company doesn’t matter. A small company will fuck over its customers just as quickly if you let them.
The size, profits, and overall global reach of a company heavily impacts how that company further impacts the world. Do you honestly think that, I don’t know, American Girl dolls have had the same negative impact on the world as the East India Company?
This is just the “both sides of the same” argument with different dressing.
It’s as false here as it is there. So you’re going to tell me a company like fairphone is as unethical as Apple or Samsung?
Yes of course they work with two completely different yields but that’s really the point The only way you can get to that yield is to be unethical so choose smaller brands choose ones that make decisions you agree with and help them grow.
There is no completely ethical capitalism but there definitely are choices that get us somewhere better.
So you’re going to tell me a company like fairphone is as unethical as Apple or Samsung?
Absolutely. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and even fair phone is profit driven. Even NPOs are profit driven. No one works for a loss in western society. No one. So literally every company will do everything it does for the sake of profitability. Even fairphone.
You have to realize that fairphone’s whole model is a marketing gimmick. Does it happen to align with some good values? Sure, but it’s still a gimmick to separate you from your money at the end of the day.
Apple fanboys are the most frustrating people to talk to.
They find any illogical reason to justify what apple does.
Go on. What does Apple do that is uniquely Apple that fanbois justify?
Was that a typo, or did you intentionally spell fanboys with an I?
Intentionally, because I’m down with the kids, innit?
You are my example. You see how defensive you got when I criticized apple?
I asked for an example or two. If that’s your best example of frustrating irrationality-pfft. :)
What about having the ability to sideload apps?
So many people are hard against that even though they are not being forced to use it.
Pot, meet kettle.
The only reason they pass on an image of ethical environmentaly friendly company is because its good for business. People like that shit the products are good people buy. Its that simple. Companies give no shit about people or the planet.
I’m cracking a joke
Ah yes, the second largest company in the world “trying to stay relevant”
Im not really brand loyal to a gizmo company but the way android users are so insecure makes me never want to get them.
What is your argument for calling 70% of all phone users insecure?
Like this response is a good example of the insecurity im talking about thanks
This is hilarious because there’s a comment just above yours that’s exactly the same, just turned on its head.
I said it to the android guy and I’m gonna say it to you: pot, meet kettle.
You have truly defended your gizmo company sir, a true white knight of fair google. Not cringe at all
Lmao, I’m an apple user, all in on the ecosystem from phone to smarthome.
Good try though.
How is that a good example of insecurity of any kind?
I see the exact opposite, and you being triggered when no one even mentioned anything you’re so offended about, proves the point.
It’s totally not your insecurity talking, at all… but do go on…
Lol what made you conclude that OP uses Android?
I never mentioned OP
Then why gratuitously bash android for some weird user-related reason?
Im not bashing android i have to use one of their devices for work; it’s ok. The users on social media with the vitriol for apple and their need to defend android is really cringe.
I hear ya. To be honest, I don’t really engage in such types of discussions - in terms of phones, gaming, browsers, hell, even movies!
Those kind of vitriolic discussions are led by a minority group who has nothing else to do in life but post stupid comments on the internet.
I could say the same about apple users. But then I go to the real world and notice that the vast majority of people couldn’t care less about such dick- (or pussy-) measuring shenanigans.
Someone who barges in a discussion getting triggered when someone said something bad about his beloved company, says he’s not. lmao
* In terms of profit, after the Saudi Arabian Oil Group. Huh, I had no idea.
Of all of the things that I vastly prefer since moving to Lemmy from reddit, anything related to Apple is not one of them. I’m actually surprised because talking about anything Apple on reddit was always a circlejerk pitchfork parade, but Lemmy still seems to outdo. The “trying to stay relevant comment” is honestly hilarious. Sure, the richest company with more than 50% of the smartphone market, that basically feeds design to the rest of the industry is trying to stay relevant.
And another thing worth addressing, It’s probably 50/50 whether the EU is forcing them to USB-C, or just providing cover for them to move to USB-C. Modern Apple (after 1997) rarely has used proprietary standards for cables/connectors, and when they have it’s pretty obviously because there isn’t a better option, or more likely, there isn’t an option that is suited to their purpose*. Apple is/was largely the reason we’re even talking about USB, being one of the first to really adopt it. Then the dock connector for iPods, which is probably the most major example of them using a proprietary connector. If you read that link (just wiki) you’ll see that the dock connector did things that no other standard connector did at the time, and it did it in a form factor that would work with iPods. Fast forward 10 years and Apple eats shit in the press for changing to Lightning, which pre-dated USB-C and has obvious advantages over one of the worst computer connectors in modern history - micro-USB**. Apple contributed significantly to the USB-C spec, which includes many of the advantages that Lightning had first, built off of the work they did with Intel in creating another standard, Thunderbolt.
And then on to today, where Apple is “forced” to use USB-C. Again, in 2016, Apple moved all of their high end laptops to exclusively USB-C, for which they would again be pilloried. People are still pissed those laptops dropped USB-A and MagSafe in favor of trying to drive adoption of USB-C and a one-connector-rules-them-all world. They also moved their Pro iPads over to C in 2018. Basically, Apple started moving its high-end, less price conscious customers to C long before legislation was a gleam in anyone’s eye. Their cheaper products (base model iPads) and mass-consumer products (iPhones) they moved much slower on, and even then there were a slate of “Apple keeps changing connectors all of the time!” (twice in 20 years) outrage-bait articles.
Yes, Apple was “forced” to use the connector they created the first design references for (Lightning/Thunderbolt, and to a lesser extend Mini-DisplayPort) and then helped design, then moved to before most, in a bid to stay “relevant” in a field they already dominate.
* Also worth noting that Apple was a main driver of adoption of USB-A, and took heat when they converted iMacs to it over PS/2, far before most PC vendors did.
** This alone, the amount of negative press they garnered, meant that there was likely no way Apple was going to move iPhones off of Lightning for 10 years.
I really really don’t think Apple needs to do much to stay relevant.
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and they only did it because the EU forced them to
Strangely, it kinda was. They helped invent the original specification. Just not so sure they wanted to put it on iphone yet (or ever)
Surprised to see so many plugging kagi in this thread. A subscription to search the internet seems crazy to me. Is it that good?
It’s like Google back in 2010. You find stuff you are looking for without pages and pages of ads, spam, and clickbait.
If you hit a domain which is obviously spam, you can block it forever. If you find a domain you really like, you can promote it for future results.
It’s clear that Google’s motivation is no longer to offer good results. It’s to maximise the time you’re on the site, and the number of ads and spam sites you click. Their goal is now, literally, to feed you bad results.
Every good result they serve you could have been an ad, so they’re incentivised to replace as many with ads as possible.
This article is a pretty good summary of why, by Google’s own words, an ad driven search experience will be rubbish:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
Not only does Kagi produce great search results, as good as “old Google” IMO, its business model means the above cannot (or at least, shouldn’t) happen. If it ever changed its model to include ads etc it would collapse so fast.
So for me, unlike the other poster, I’d recommend it to everyone who’s finding the existing search engines are rubbish and full of useless Etsy and SEO etc links.
Pinterest links are the worst. I just don’t want that shit and images of random crap isn’t what I’m after.
I can’t find any information about their search engine crawler. Isn’t it standard for search engines to label their crawlers or something?
It’s conventional to do this, but a user agent string is entirely up to the client, and robots.txt is just a suggestion.
So for the best results, you probably want to mock Google’s crawler because it’s suicidal to block that if you want search traffic.
Brave words divorced from reality.
Cable companies wouldn’t insert ads, people pay for a premium experience with cable instead of getting their TV free over the air. If they did people would just cancel and watch free tv.
Then later: Streaming companies wouldn’t insert ads, the ability to watch on your time, terms and without interruption is part of the appeal, if they did their customers would leave them and they’d collapse. It would be the death of any company foolish enough to do so.
🤡
Markets and competition will save us cried the fool with no knowledge of history.
If they grow they need to keep growing, if their results are good enough they’ll introduce “limited” tracking for “trusted partners” with limited ads that are “valuable and relevant”. And from there it can spiral more but you’ve already lost.
As revenue, tracking, taking a big yearly check from Zuck or whoever to share your data with them. It’s a good source of revenue and unless this company is privately financed by one weirdo entirely out of their own pockets they have a responsibility to investors to get them ever increasing year over year returns.
Of course the typical thing to do is to get big enough first like streaming. Train the fool consumers to pay for something they’re getting for free, normalize that, grow, then sock them with ads, tracking, inconveniences and train them to accept more and more of it.
Brave words divorced from reality. 🤡
How would you estimate the likelyhood of kagi going the way you describe?
Paying for a service ensures your incentives (mostly) align. Kagi’s incentive is to make a good search that makes you want to pay for it, google’s incentives are to gather your data to either sell or use themselves, and show you as many ads as possible.
I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone because it’s really expensive, but for me it’s great, and I save at least one hour a day at work since I don’t waste my time filtering the results from DDG or Google.
It’s subjective of course but I’m happy about it so far.
I tried the trial for two days before I bought in and completely gave up google. Kagi is absolutely amazing and well worth the money, not just because there’s no ads or selling of your data, but because the search results are miles better than any alternative now. I have over 50k searches in my google history and at one point in my career I would average around a hundred searches a day. I know what I need from a search engine and Kagi absolutely gives it to me.
Yeah, I scoffed at the idea of paying. And paying $10/mo. Then I used it. And I keep using it. A lot. And now0 looks like I’m going to be paying for it for a while.
I thought it sounded pretty silly, too. I gave the free trial a shot and for technical searches it was the best I had seen by far. Being able to lower certain sites and raise other sites makes it much easier to filter through shitty results like blog posts and stuff. I pay for it now and it’s worth it to me just for the time savings on technical searches. It definitely is still pretty far behind for things like local business info and stuff, but as a general purpose search engine it’s been extremely good for me.
Or the most annoying thing, trying to research a topic with one word matching that of a recent news event. So you only ever see news sites.
My experience doesn’t go past the free trial, but yes, it is very good. It’s basically Google-level search quality, but without the removal of features and dropping quality that Google itself experiences in the last few years.
That said, it’s still just a regular old search engine. If you used Google 10 years ago, you have a pretty good idea what this feels like. It doesn’t really do anything new or revolutionary. It’s not a “wow, this is amazing” experience, it’s just a “well, this actually works” kind of thing.
Not something I’d pay $10/month for, but if you want to move away from Google without it feeling like a downgrade, it’s currently the only real alternative. Bing, DDG (which is just Bing with window dressing), Yandex, BraveSearch are all still quite a bit worse than Google and even Google itself is nowhere near as good as it once was.
Recently I get good result with Ecosia.
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Yeah, it’s very good. Not having results full of shit like geeksforgeeks or Pinterest is nice, but possible with browser extensions. Being able to influence the rank of different sites, to either bubble up or down in your results is one of the secret killer features
I started using duck duck go a few months ago and have felt like my search results are a lot more useful since.
The maps function on it sucks though
DDG uses Apple Maps.
that explains that then
The maps it used were a lot worse, so this is a recent improvement
I wish they would use leaflet
I mean, it makes sense, DDG already use apple maps for their maps platform.
Duck duck go sucks for porn I stopped using it a while ago. Until they fix that I’m out.
The man has priorities
Bing image search is surpringly efficient for this
Isn’t it the same search index?
Or piracy
Oddly enough I used DDG once for an artist and actually got results meanwhile Google gave me irrelevant shit
I’ve been using duckduckgo for the last month and change and I’m not really a fan. Especially for things here in Japan, it can give really wonky results (today I was looking for the closest post office and searched ‘\ post office’. It gave me a website to get directions, but no indication of where it might be nor, y’know, even the post office’s website). Google has gotten continually worse for me, but this was, in most cases, just barely as good or worse.
It’s been my default for years. Usually I find what I want. When I don’t, I go back to the search box and put !g at the front, which sends the search to google.
!sp (Startpage) gives you the same results as Google but without personalized ads or ad tracking.
!s is actually enough
Thanks both! Will try to remember this for next time.
To confirm, are you also toggling the Japan region for searches?
I didn’t notice that was a thing, but it defaulted to Japan so we’re safe there.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Oct 4 (Reuters) - Apple (AAPL.O) held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google as the default search engine for the private mode on Apple’s Safari browser, the Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
The details of the talks are expected to be released later this week, according to the report, after Judge Amit Mehta, overseeing a federal antitrust suit against Google, ruled on Wednesday that he would unseal the testimony of DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple executive John Giannandrea.
Apple, DuckDuckGo and Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice in a landmark U.S. trial argued Google, which has some 90% of the search market, illegally paid $10 billion annually to smartphone makers such as Apple and wireless carriers like AT&T (T.N) and others to be the default in search on their devices in order to stay on top.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified on Monday, saying that tech giants were competing for vast troves of content needed to train artificial intelligence, and complained Google was locking up content with expensive and exclusive deals with publishers.
He added that Microsoft had sought to make its Bing search engine the default on Apple smartphones but was rebuffed.
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Duck duck go needs a lot of work to replace Google search.
I’ve used it for years but often I still get the shits and just bring Google up after duck duck go fails to find what I’m looking for.
Huh I’m also a regular DDG user but I never have that experience.
For 9 of 10 search DDG give me what I’m looking for in the top results, for the other time I just add g! to the search and its sends me to google.
For me the direct opposite is true. About two years ago Google stopped giving me any accurate results, feeding me a bunch of semi-related garbage instead. DuckDuckGo feels like the Google of old: results that actually (literally) contain the terms of the query and not much else. I’d hate using the internet without it.
I felt the same way. Lately, though, ddg has been serving unrelated garbage ads in the middle of my searches. I am now looking for something new. Startpage has some decent results so far…
Yeah, have had a similar experience. I find the more specific or niche a question is, the better google is at finding relevant pages. DDG is perfectly fine the rest of the time, though, so I keep it as the default.
I usually forget I’m using it. Exception is for work - I frequently have to specify
g!to get Stackoverflow results to show up at the top.The android app is nice, especially the app tracking blocker. It takes up the VPN connection tho
Did DDG move away from consolidating results from Google and other engines?
Bing now
I tried to switch to DDG as my default search on iOS but my adblocker doesn’t block ads on it but it does on google, so I switched back
DDG has a built-in option to determine whether you want to see ads or not.
You can turn off ads directly in DDG settings
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Sweet, I can switch back then
I tried to switch but the results were terrible. I ended up on bing which is still inferior to google but better than being google even if it is another behemoth data gathering company. At this point im just trying to stop centralizing who gets all my data don’t lest it’s a bit fragmented.
ddg gets its results from bing, I’d recommend startpage if you want google results while being privacy respecting.
Duck duck go is crap these days, probably since it uses Bing. All I ever get are “7 best ways to…” click bait, probably AI generated “articles”.
I’ve been trying to use DDG but honestly it sucks. I can’t imagine Apple switching to it, it would just make things worse for users, who commonly can’t figure out how to switch defaults. I think it’s just a negotiating point.
What difficulties are you finding with it and are you switching from Google? The results are as custom as Google given they haven’t scraped your life history so wondering if that’s it? I’ve been using DDG without any issues. About once every 6 months I struggle to find something so try the Google bang but have never found better results. In fact, I was shocked last time how crap the Google results were, just full of AI generated crap and SEO based crap.
To be honest, DDG is also struggling with that now as it’s based on Bing. I have been trying a public searxg but not found it very good so far.
Try Kagi. You may love it like I did.
Genuinely curious, what makes it so great?
For me, it finds smaller websites that usually contain the information I need, but aren’t SEOd that well so they don’t appear on ad-driven search engines. Also the programming lens is great
Hell no. Paying for something that’s the same as ddg. That’s a terrible idea, and the results aren’t any better, despite how much their marketing claims it to be and that smaller blogs show up more.
I guess you get what you pay for then lol
In this case you actually get more for free. Not to mention the paid service is a privacy nightmare since all of the searched are done through a logged in user. Which also means it’s incompatible with private browsing. But their marketing says “trust me bro”, while they’re selling you an overrated product. DDG even simply through a VPN is a million times more private then any logged in service. You need to assume if something is trackable, it will be tracked. Don’t follow marketing blindly.
I primarily use it. What sucks about it? It isn’t as flashy without those little quick answers that Google throws together, but those are garbage a lot of the time anyway imo. Otherwise, I don’t really have any issues finding what I need that I can think of
Only thing I miss is Google shopping sometimes. That actually is really useful when you need a super obscure part that’s not available on ebay or Amazon and just sold on three random websites. Google shopping will show them and let you compare prices perfectly.
I have been trying to use it for years but it just literally has a lot of issues with pretty normal search queries that worked perfectly on Google 15 years ago.
I want it to be good. But it’s not.
Don’t agree.
I switched from Google quite recently, as I knew it was hard…
But now I’m mostly not using
!gunless for fewcache:searches or when I want use few features (sport results, without going to specific websites).You’ve to use some search syntax items more as
+but otherwise it’s quite good and clear to read.That didn’t stop them from plowing ahead with Apple Maps, even though its debut was total garbage.
Debut and still is garbage.
There’s a reason why Apple users have both installed.
Does Apple Maps even have reviews?
It’s not trash like the iOS 6 launch.
Yes, it has Yelp integration for reviews.
They should make a deal with Kagi if they had any brains.
Even though im not sure if Kagi could take that amount of traffic right away.
Vote for Brave search.
