DeGoogle Yourself

I haven't noticed any issues with the quality of DDG results, but if you feel the results are lackluster, you could try a metasearch engine like SearXNG. You can self-host it or use one of the many public instances maintained by the community. The main advantage, apart from the privacy focused aspect of the project, is that you can pull results from multiple search engines with a single query. It's highly customizable too. You can configure it exactly how you want.

I use Qwant instead and I'm pretty happy wiith that.

At some point, DuckDuckGo stop handling boolean logic properly in search terms. I've been using it for more than a decade, and the quality has definitely gotten worse over the last few years

I like qwant.com from France. They are using the Bing index but started to collaborate with Ecosia to build their own.

There's only a handful of companies out there actually spidering. A lot of third party offerings are just re-scraping the existing spiders. I wouldn't be surprised if deficiencies in quality were cat and mouse games between google/bing/et all and DuckDuckGo.

I've been self-hosting SearXNG. It's fantastic for everything except local hits, business hours, stuff where Google maps data is being referenced.

I think the problem with free search is that somebody needs to pay for it. There's more people block both ads and anonymize themselves, the more free options will eventually wither.

And while I'm perfectly willing to pay for ad-free anonymity, capitalism dictates that all services need to have exponential growth or fail, and eventually all that data can just be sold or otherwise make it into the wrong hands.

I'm kind of hoping that at some point you can purchase distilled search content in a locally hostable AI model. It could post ad free and complete anonymous access, and you just need to pay for updates to the search model.

You can find a good Searxng instance or run your own (it can also run on a RPi)

I have been very happy with Kagi. I think that it is worth the money. I did quit it though, in line with the US boycott, so now i am on Quant.

For you, I would recommend the following:

• Startpage
• SearXNG
• LibreY
• araa
• Whoogle
• Leta
• Brave Search

I use SearXNG, which I self-host.

I switched to Kagi and am beyond satisfied. If your goal is to strictly degoogle, it fits the bill, but it still does if you are looking for better privacy, as it now comes with an implementation of Privacy Pass. The algorithm is leagues above Google's and DDGs, IMO, and the "lens" feature allows you to seamlessly filter the results to specialized sources, including the Fediverse. "Small web" is a fun feature for when you're bored running unit tests at work, too

https://www.qwant.com/

• Have you also experienced this worsening of DuckDuckGo?

Yes.

• Which other more privacy-respecting alternatives do you recommend?

I'm in the same boat. I'll be trying out these answers.

I've definitely felt the enshittification of DDG. A couple of years ago they would start dropping hits related to my location into my search results, even when I had region off and private search by default. That gave me the impression that my IP address was being used and possibly passed on to Bing, but I don't have the chops to confirm it 🤷

Maybe I search for weird things, but my major gripe with DDG is that its autocorrect is way too aggressive. But SearXNG public instances work for me 99% of the time.

I have thought the same thing after about three years or so of using DDG, I've been using Qwant as of late and seem to get much better results

Been happy with Kagi for the past few months. So far no thoughts of switching back to either Google or DDG.

Kagi is pretty amazing. You have to pay but the peace of mind is worth it for the respect of your privacy. FastGPT is a phenomenally helpful tool that I use multiple times per day. Kagi.com

I haven't used DDG in years. I've been using Start Page and its fit all my needs (its basically old google before enshitification).

I've played with searxng which seems promising but I haven't given it enough time. But it seems like I might eventually move there.

Searx is good enough if you set up plenty of engines - I do look up quite a lot of stuff and not once in the past 3 months did I go "yeah I need to use google for this".

I use StartPage because it’s the closest to Google 10+ years ago.

I run my own instance of SearX. Very reliable.

You can try hosting a searxng instance. If not try some public searxng instances. https://searx.space/

Been using Qwant for about a month. Feels like of like old Google did, very happy.

Only place it’s lacking is image search, but Google has been pretty shite for the past year too.

Duckduckgo gives you Bing results. If you like Microsoft they are up the alley. If not tough luck.

DDG is often but not always a lot worse than Google in my experience.

I mostly use startpage, but occasionally ecosia and mojeek.

I’ve tried other search engines any times. Despite the worsening google search somehow is still much better than alternatives.

you can search through brave or google using mullvads leta:

https://leta.mullvad.net/

i have noticed that i get fewer results from ddg lately, and local (server-side geoip driven) and totally irrelevant shit frequently thrown in starting below the fold on page 1.

but ddg has been my go-to for years. and very rarely do i need to look elsewhere for a different 'perspective'--picking from the others configured in my browser: ecosia, startpage, qwant, mojeek. i have a couple instances of self-hostable meta engines in there too, but those are too unreliable to count on for regular use.

I think in the last few years DDG has been improving and google has been worsening for general searching. Because I have nearly stopped using !g before I used it constantly.

I still use google at work as the results there match a bit better.

I haven't really experienced a worsening of DDG, and this is a bit off topic, perhaps, but—

I have yet to find a better alternative to Google's video search. Google Books also remains valuable in many ways, since it will give you different "search inside the book"-type search results than the Internet Archive will (and they also have some books that IA does not).

What's annoying to me is that StartPage, which is supposed to have Google search results, and by and large does, does not give the same video results as Google (go ahead, try it). It would also be nice to have an Invidious or FreeTube type front end for Google Books, and I believe there used to be something like that, but not any longer.

Some Google products still have definite value, it's just important that they derive no benefit from us using them.