Been slowly running into more results from DDG that seem to have some “personal parameter” or difference in search results. 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.
I see this as only getting worse, I want to be able to enter a search and it searches for my query. Not based on my personality or whatever info is being collected. Does anyone know a search engine that’s reliable and focuses on giving the same results and doesn’t try this “personalized” crap?
Startpage has been my go to for a while. Between it and ecosia I can usually find what I’m looking for
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’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.
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.
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.
no problem, this map might be useful: https://www.searchenginemap.com/
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.
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=%sI’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.
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.
Yep! I am new to here from Reddit. And holy shit do I love Lemmy! Sooo glad I stopped using reddit and found Lemmy!
