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I know what you mean. I still use it all the same as my default search, the reason is the bang (!) Operators.

So if the ddg normal search isn't working, I can add a g and I get the Google version. Or if I want Google maps... Then I just add gm

The other one I use a lot is wolfram alpha for unit conversions and calculations, just add a wa

Hacker news search is HN

Having this one stop shop for many different search types end up being way better than Google, even if somethimes the regular search may not be so great

+1 for ddg's bang operators. I use w for Wikipedia, gsc for Google scholar, py for Python docs, pypi, imdb, and tvdb frequently. Here's a searchable list: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Ok TIL, never knew they were a thing!

Kagi also has bangs. My muscle memory carried over from ddg so I often forget if I'm using Kagi on my personal device or ddg on my work laptop.

What's the advantage of those over just adding those keywords to the browser's search bar? I can type "gm anything" in all of my browser, and it will just open Google Maps directly. I don't understand why people keep calling this a great feature of ddg when you can achieve the same without the detour through ddg.

I switched to SearXNG and never looked back since. It's a meta search engine that encompasses multiple other engines like google, bing, ddg, wikipedia, openstreetmaps and many more. You can always select which engines you want to use and the best is that this tool makes your search anonymous. you have to select a server at searx.space and then you right click the url to make it the default search engine on firefox.

Doesn't ddg pull results from Bing? I don't think that would solve your problem.

I will recommend the obvious choices if you haven't considered them already.

  • StartPage - pulls from Google
  • Brave - Independent and yields really good results, however relies on Bing/Google for images

agreed I’ve had really good luck with brave for searches and it allows bangs too

Right now I am testing Kagi, which is a paid alternative - from a privacy point of view, it looks great, and the results are good. It also has a lot of additional features that suit me well. No Maps integration though. alternatively, I can recommend SearXNG, but it involves a bit of tinkering.

Seconded on Kagi. I've been using it for a few months now. Good results and I think it makes sense to pay for search. As the old saying goes "if it's free online, you are the product".

I've been using Kagi for about a month, and I have to say the searches are excellent! No more wasting time searching through over-SEO'd ad-ridden crap! Just high quality results!

Kagi is well worth the price imo. I never really have to fall back to a different search engine; it's way better than DDG. It also has lenses that you can customize to really narrow down results to exactly what you need.

Never heard of it before. First thing that came to mind, is, if it's privacy focused, it's odd to have to create an account, and give their your credit card, if you are 'privacy focused', it sounds like the opposite you'd want.

But they do address those on their site, which is neat. I dunno if I'm ready to switch from Google, tho, worst case, sometimes I ask Bing instead when google's results are of... questionable quality. I wonder how kagi would fare on those..

I get what you mean, though on the other hand, a company that bills itself as privacy focused and is funded by user payments is (most likely) serving the users with search as the product, and not harvesting minute data from the users in order to serve advertizers with users as the product. Maybe they have your name and credit card, but don't track and retain anything else? I wouldn't assume that and would read through their actual terms - I think this could go either way - but I wouldn't write the whole thing off automatically either.

Edit: could be it's not unlike paying a VPN/privacy focused email provider like Proton, which supposedly has your payment info (for premium/pro) but not the content of your emails, etc.

@bermuda @technology Another vote for Searx-NG. I found it pretty easy to set up via docker (although there are some public instances you can use to try it out to see if you like the results).

I’ve been impressed by how well brave search is on the brave browser

DDG isn't perfect by a long shot, but it's still leagues better than google. I think SEO overall has taken a nosedive in recent years, especially with AI written content muddying the waters. Unfortunately I do not know of an alternative that's better than either.

As a trucking dispatcher I have relied more on Bing Maps because they are more updated than Google maps sometimes. Google maps is almost impossible to search for a specific thing when you're in a pinch, because there will be an ad for a competitor at the top of the list and you can easily be misled if you are in a rush. Happened to my bf a few weeks ago when he was searching for the closest UPS (near closing time) and inadvertently drove to a FedEx because it was the ad at the top of the search results. By the time he realized his mistake the UPS was closed. Fuck Google.

It's not that seo has taken a nosedive ( I guess, it does depend on whose perspective ) More like, it's become such an hyper-focus on it that we have a bunch of seo-driven drivel destroying the quality of the results.

People mostly figured out how google wants things to rank them high. So they do only that. And a lot of it. Anything that doesn't gets relegated to further down results, or, gasp, the second page. Which means a loss in revenu, so you kinda --have-- to do it, business wise.

I'm a part time delivery person and bing maps is honestly really good, it's just a shame there's no mobile app because I'd probably switch to it in a heartbeat. As you said, google maps is really good but it fudges specifics a lot and gives you incorrect directions for certain addresses.

Search engines are about to become almost useless due to GenerativeAI flooding the internet. I don't know if there's any possible solution

At least some of the AI spam might start to point me at the solution to my problem, unlike a lot of current "we just put a shitload of this keyword in this listicle that says exactly nothing" SEO garbage.

But yeah. I miss old search that actually worked.

I have used Qwant myself at times.

Since Bing chat was released, I mostly switched to Bing and even there I have to go to Google for about 20% of the searches after Bing not really giving me great search results (in the cases I need to search for things that I don't want to or can use Bing chat for). So I doubt any privacy-friendly search engine will do a better job.

I have used Qwant in the past, but the search results were just so much worse. That experiment did not last longer than a week.

Oh I totally forgot about Bing chat being a thing. I might have to check that out when I get the chance.

https://www.mojeek.com/is an alternative

I’ve been using DDG as a Google replacement for a 3-4 years now. I have to say that my experience in terms of search results has been the opposite of yours. Google’s ads were so prominent and the search results so lacking what I wanted to see, it has become totally useless to me. DDG on the other hand almost always shows me what I’m looking for in the first few results.

Having said that, I’ve been using DDG long enough that perhaps I’m just acclimated to its features and functionality.

Strange, i personally use searx via xo.wtf

I've recently learnt of a project called Whoogle. It's still on my things to check out list, so can't vouch for it myself, but I've heard good things about it.

Whoogle is what I’ve been using for a couple years. I found that you ideally need multiple IPs to query from though as it can quickly get rate limited by Google - if you perform a few searches in relative quick succession.

Thanks, will keep that in mind

SearX