this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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Some alternatives:
I paid for kagi for a year or two. Problem (for me) is, they are very USA centric and offer less value to other regions. For region-independet search they were on par or better with google.
That's my problem with DDG too, unless the query makes sense for the US it outputs mostly garbage. They don't handle localization very well, or at all.
Not trying to pick on one thing but I guess I am focusing on it in my reply.
Am I the only person that thinks duck duck Go is no longer worth recommending?
I think it outperforms both Mojeek and Qwant, so it's my go to right now. Mojeek has a very small index and Qwant is slower. Haven't tried Brave or Kagi yet.
No, it's not just you. DDG hasn't been very good in my recent experience. I bit the bullet and gave Kagi a try and it's been excellent. It's what I recommend now.
It's not free, but I'll gladly pay to ensure that I'm the customer being tailored to instead of the product being sold.
Yeah initially it felt silly to pay for a search engine, but I gave kagi a try and really like it. I could immediately turn off all ai shit. I can block websites that are ai trash or that I just plain don't like or I can just down rank a website so I'll see other results first. For example, I have the Minecraft fandom website downranked but not blocked so that if I'm searching for something that isn't documented on the Minecraft wiki then the fandom page will still pop up, it just won't be the top result ever
Also, I'm on the basic 300 searches a month and I've never hit the max despite feeling like I search a lot between my phone and computer
Edit: there's also a little indicator next to websites that have a lot of trackers and ads so you can avoid or block those sites if you want
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the AI stuff specifically opt-in, not simply easily opt-out as you describe? I'm a (happy) paid subscriber and AI results only occur if I invoke it with the "?" at the end of the search.
Yeah you're right it's opt-in. Its been a while since I got kagi so I couldn't remember which way it was, just that you have full control over whether to use their ai features or not
I've been using DDG since the beginning when it was an inferior product to Google, manly because of the bang! search feature (which replaced Yubnub for me) and for the privacy aspect. If a DDG search didn't give me good results, I could just add !g and see the Google results. It cut down my dependence on Google by about 75% at the time but only got better as the '10s wore on. By 2020 it was just a better search engine.
Since then it seems to be going through the same enshittification that Google went through, although they know that they live & die on their privacy feature and that seems to still be better. Instead, they have added the AI summary ("search assist" is not auto by default, so a basic search doesn't query the AI), prioritize a few of the top hits on the search (along with context results like wikipedia, dictionary, stock summaries, etc.), but the rest of the results on the first page appear to be paid ranking pages. Below that are related searches, and below that is the "more results" button that is the hits that used to come before the paid ranking pages.
Even though it seems to be sliding into the same patterns as other commercial search engines, I still think it is better than most of the alternatives. I still set it to default some from the browser I can do things like search for RAM on NewEgg ("!ne 16gb crucial ram") and go directly to that page instead of going to a search results page that may or may not be a sponsored link that takes five seconds to load because of spotty wireless & all of the 3rd party elements having to load.
Could you please tell me why you dislike it?
I simply feel like search quality has dropped, and I'm no longer able to find quick answers.
That does not mean the competitors are better, it just means ddg is slipping hard imo
There's also Ecosia that lets you choose between Bing and Google as result provider. (And for a while now they have been working on a European Web Index with Qwant to replace the US sources.)
And they plant trees!
Shouldn't "paid" be a a huge advantage, if we are complaining about advertising?
Main problem with "paid" is that you have to log in for searching = all your searches can be tied to your payment into / identity. That's a big no-no.
Not to mention Kagi is based in the U.S. Whatever privacy promises they make are bullshit.
Either bullshit or delusional (which amounts to bullshit for the users) if they don't realize that they can't do anything about a FISA court order. Do they have a warrant canary at least?
Yes: https://kagi.com/privacy
They also have options for anonymous search.
I’m curious about how well they enforce that, and how as a European on European servers they do more, but I wil assume it’s all transparent to state actors. As are all others.
The benefits are in corporations and being monetized.
Yeah they will all be transparent to state actors. Which is why the best option imo is to mix our searches by doing them in private browser windows of different browsers, occasionally wiping history and sometimes using VPN / tor
VPN providers and torrent sites solved this a while ago, allowing anonymous payments: crypto, even mailing cash.
Are you really so naive to assume that your searches tied together won't allow to identify you within days? Please never work in cybersecurity.
Also, crypto coins are a scam nowadays, thanks to the investment markets making them unstable as fuck.
Bad news for you, I do work in cybersecurity (for over a decade), and I don't search for "hot singles in my exact address", so a bunch of k8s error message searches and the odd banana bread recipe won't identify me in a while.
Working in cybersecurity and mistaking your own online behavior as being relevant for everyone else. How could that possibly backfire? /s
If someone cares, they have to be careful. No amount of anonymous tor usage will prevent exposing you if you Google your name and social security number.
You shouldn't go around advising people to use anonymous payment methods for search engines that "protect your privacy". That's really bad advice, is all I am saying. But good for you...
They protect your privacy as much as a search engine can.
You really need to step back and reevaluate.
What exactly?
In this scenario: Your assessment of the reality of what "protecting people's privacy" means.
Not everyone on the Internet has money to burn.
So then we need to choose between advertising or demanding unpaid labor...
we need that altruistic billionaire just doing it for the love of the consumer
yeah you know that's how most of them become billionaires, by being altruistic and always putting others before their own needs.
exactly!!!!
It's a difficult choice indeed
no one's demanding unpaid labor
I use DDG but i wish it filtered out sites that are clearly 100% AI generated
Problem with all SEO is AI is really good at grabbing hold of the search crawlers and creating articles on questions whether it answers the question or not. I sometimes search by date published so older non ai articls have a chance. Perhaps they could increase the wighting based on age.
I use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ together with the uBlacklist browser extension. It lets you ban domains from your search results across all major search engines and also lets you subscribe to blacklists compiled by others, such as https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist (I see now that this hasn't been updated since last year, but there are most likely others out there.)
I wish it didn't append completely irrelevant "Apple Maps" results for places thousands of miles way, to everything I search for.
I would imagine ddg can't licence Google maps. I'm surprised they don't use bing maps (if that's still a thing)
They used to use Openstreetmap, which was very accurate where I lived, and also seemed to be reasonably good at knowing when something needed a map (like a business or location you were trying to find) and when it didn't need a map (like any other normal search).
Brave has its own index. I'm happy with it. No crypto stuff there.
Fuck brave. One huge anti-feature collection.
is this satire?
I use it with Librewolf. Search engine is just a website. I don't count Brave as Big Tech so that is a win in my book.