DeGoogle Yourself
A community for those that would like to get away from Google.
Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!
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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.
Didn't know about several of these, cheers!
You can find a good Searxng instance or run your own (it can also run on a RPi)
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 🤷
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
Forgot to mention that it unfortunately is a US-owned company, so it would be off the table for the full-on US boycott crowd, especially because it's a paid service.
Though they seem to be a genuinely good company that consistenly provides good customer support and improves the product in tangible ways. Privacy Pass was implemented because of customer feedback, for example, and so were crypto payments, and both were publicly discussed on the forums with good transparency. They also actively promote the decentralization of the internet: with that Small Web feature I mentioned, with Fediverse and Usenet Archives search being implemented by default, by providing an interface to use any LLM model through their assistant... So I wouldn't want to boycott them, and I don't
I tried Kagi for a while, but it was giving me less useful results than DDG, so I simply left it. I think it depends a lot on what kinds of searches one does, and Kagi is more useful for other users.
AFAIK the algorithm for Kagi is really alien compared to Google and Bing/DDG, so the results do look a little weird at first, the main difference being just the sheer reduction in quantity of results.
But I guess if you didn't like it, you didn't. Maybe it is worse and I'm biased because I already paid
- 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.
Same^2
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
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.
I've been using SearXNG during the last day and I'm quite impressed too so far!
True what you say about the problems behind net search. It's actually a very complex problem. In my opinion part of the problem is that there's a lot (most?) of rubbish out there. It's like a library with useful books of different genres all mixed together, and mixed with an even larger amount of nonsense books. Maybe a solution would be something completely different from indexing – but I have no idea what.
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
Thank you for the suggestion. I tried Kagi a couple of times, but it missed the useful results that DDG or Google were giving, so I dropped it.
It depends of course on what kinds of searches one typically needs. Probably there isn't a universally best search engine.
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.
You can try hosting a searxng instance. If not try some public searxng instances. https://searx.space/
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'm trying SearX today, after so many recommended it. It looks promising! Thank you for pointing out the multiple-engines setup.
One possible drawback: it seems I can't do "verbatim" searches; or at least, quotation marks don't seem to lead to verbatim searches – I'll try with "+". DDG was adamant with quotation marks, that's something I liked a lot about it.
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.
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
I’ve tried other search engines any times. Despite the worsening google search somehow is still much better than alternatives.
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 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 mostly use startpage, but occasionally ecosia and mojeek.
Been happy with Kagi for the past few months. So far no thoughts of switching back to either Google or DDG.
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.
I remember reading that there was something "fishy" with Startpage, which is why I abandoned it quickly. But don't remember where.
Luckily I don't often search for videos, but I agree that it seems difficult to find good search alternatives there.
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 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.
Btw https://mwmbl.org/ is an interesting project, although not usable yet