I have always liked and used Duck duck go more than google but now i am considering if i should switch because of the shit they pulled with their app and yesterday when i clicked a link it took me directly to their newsletter subsciption page not even like a popup a proper page without any way except manually backing out . So is there a better alternative or is DDG still the best ? Would appreciate if the search ingine came with firefox and i don’t have to jump through hoops to use it. I moved the post from ask lemmy to here .And also i deleted the post from ask lemmy because i thought it wasn’t the appropriate sub (i know should’ve thought of that before posting )
Maybe kagi? I use it and like it
There is some controversy recently due to partnering with Brave for search results, and the response to comments. Brave tends to be controversial any time it comes up anyway, outside of Eich’s political views.
company x founder personal political views was not a factor in this evaluation for this or any any provider we added (for betteor or worse) and merit of technology was the main factor. Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reasons we do not have innovation any more
People can go whatever direction they want with that.
This is also not their only controversy. When someone proposed in their forums that Kagi should add a widget that would help people get help if they are searching for suicide material, Kagi refused because that isn’t the result that the person was searching for.
He later apologized for that comment extensively.
he was also removing criticism form queer folks on their Discord while leaving up valuable discussion points like “stop shoving LGBTQ down our throats”.
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well, I saw the thread being deleted while I was reading it. I would’ve posted it myself but, y’know.
It’s controversy for some people who are looking for perfect companies.
Others like me realize that they don’t exist, and you should choose something, anything, other than Google that you feel happy with. Today.
For a while I was self hosting whoogle but it’s been kind of problematic and gets rate limited very quickly. I have been looking at switching to searxng. For both of these you can find some hosted for the public but their security may not be as robust as a company like duck duck go would be. It’s a shame too that duckduckgo does actually collect data and send it to Microsoft as part of their agreement in order to use bing as their backend.
The data collection of DDG only regarded their browser, not the search engine.
I’ve got my own whoogle instance and have never been rate-limited
Running whoogle aswell and never been rate limited, but I did need to setup a horizontal pod autoscalaer on my deployment because it kept getting into a invalid state. Now kubernetes will just shoot the pod in the head and spin up another. Lol
I was self-hosting a whoogle instance but it stopped working and instead it would send me to google to accept cookies, so I nuked it.
How many times are you gonna make this post?
Dude went ahead and deleted the last one I commented on, at this point I think hes tryina use the “Delete post” button as the search button
Its not just posts, this is at least the second time I’ve blocked an account with that name for making these low effort spammy posts.
And this one is only 8 days old, so I think they’re making accounts on different instances with the same name.
No i can assure you its my only account and yes its a new one . In fact this is the only account i have on any kind of social media to this day .
EDIT: why are you guys down voating me i am telling the truth or do you guys know things about me that i don’t or something ?Just look at my profile would someone with an alt do this much activity ? And also i deleted the post from ask lemmy because i thought it wasn’t the appropriate sub (i know should’ve thought of that before posting )
I deleted the post because of your comment . It sucked that much .
Hopefully the last time. And no i won’t give any.
All I want is a search engine that 1. doesn’t make moral judgements on the results relevant to a search, 2. filters out ai and ad farm results by default, and 3. can be toggled to effectively search web 1.0-style forums.
Search results were amazing back in the day. There were like a couple 100 good websites and it was all just text indexes.
The web is simply too big not to do ranked searches.
The big problem is how they are ranked though.
Interesting.
I hope for a new paradigm in web searching. I wouldn’t even mind if a search took 5-10 minutes, if it meant a handful of quality results. I easily waste that much time or more sifting through garbage ai and ad-driven results as it stands.
I like Mojeek. It even has an option to search without using locational data, which is something that’s important to me.
I’m pretty sure I was able to just go to mojeek.com, right click the address bar, and add it to Firefox. I didn’t need an add-on or anything like that.
yup. then also go into firefox settings to change your search default if you want…
https://www.mojeek.com/support/browsers/firefox.htmlYep, and while you’re in there, you can also remove any of the default search engines to reduce clutter.
Yeah its in the options of search engine provided by firefox . Can someone back this guy up or disagree with him ?
Not that this will convince you, but worth noting that Mojeek also has a Lemmy presence: @Mojeek@lemmy.ml
It is kinda convincing me
howdy 👋
Uh if i may ask do you guys guarantee privacy and security without any hidden catches .
EDIT: I have decided to stick eith you guys for the time being.
no hidden catches no
Ok thanks
I use seaxrng everyday, ddg if I cant find something and startpage for 🏴☠️
DDG is still the best.
Stop asking this same question repeatedly.
I have the idea DDG (or Bing which powers it) is getting worse, if you search for items, you first get a load of webstores selling that item and a Wikipedia article might show up on page 2 at best.
Yeah it’s definitely taken a sharp nosedive over the past 9 months.
I miss dogpile siiiigh
They really need to prioritize Wikipedia in general, but, also, maybe I just need to make Wikipedia my homepage instead.
Use !w in front of your ddg search to search Wikipedia.
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They were bought by an advertising company, which is a bit sketchy.
They block Tor/VPNs.
Proton user here, never had a problem with that.
The only problem is that apparently startpage was purchased by an advertising company, which seems like an awful match.
I’m on a VPN (Mullvad) and not blocked by Startpage.
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They blocked my IP Vanish VPN which is why I moved away from them to Kagi.
Given the other comments about VPN’s it sounds like it’s not consistent.
Disclaimer - Spend your money how you want. Use what works for your needs and moral standing. This post is a data point for consideration, not an endorsement.
I use Kagi with the unlimited search paid version. Whether it’s my own needs, friends, family, etc, I always seem to be the one doing the searching for everyone I interact with. After years of Google feeding more and more sponsored links into the results I switched to DDG, and after about 6 months of finding their results lackluster I tried Kagi.
For me, it works. I don’t know that I’ll use it forever or anything but at the moment it does a better job of getting me reliable results within the first few sites and I can move on with my day. I just need quick, accurate search results. So far Kagi has been that.
I did the free trial thing a couple times to see how it worked before paying and I’d suggest that to anyone thinking about switching. Give it a week or two on trial accounts and if it sucks then it probably isn’t for you.
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Allowed tracking for microsoft .
I believe this is old news now? Heard someone else say that they don’t do it any longer. Might have to look into this for some updated clearance myself too.
I thought they’ve been doing this for years or something.
I’m not sure about how private it is, but I use Ecosia for my search engine. It works great for me, and the images are alright. They are pretty transparent with their privacy, and you help plant trees too!
I like DogPile. It lets you get results from Yahoo! directory, Lycos, Excite, WebCrawler, Infoseek, AltaVista, WhatUSeek, and HotBot.
AskJeeves works pretty well too.
Til lycos and Altavista still exist
I guess you could say the same about AskJeeves since they rebranded as just Ask.
I miss those days of the internet.
Me too. I’m personally not going to stop using ddg because it’s a losing battle. It won’t be long before the next little search engine sells out.
Damn. Dogpile still exists? I used to use that before Google took over.
Maybe Kagi (paid) or Searxng. I use mostly searxng but some kagi options are nice like blocking results from certain domains or lower their appearance in results…
You can just right click on the url bar to add search engines to firefox, I did that for the nixos package repository and youtube.
As for duck duck go, you can try searxng instances though you are putting your trust in some random admins in that case.
It’s not a blind trust system with searxng. They have an integrity check in order to be added to the list. This is relative to the searxng GitHub repository which is fully open.
Mullvad leta but it requires a mullvad account and that you’re connected to your vpn
