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stravanasu @lemmy.ca

Getting unhappy about DuckDuckGo

For several years I've been using DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search, and I've been overall quite happy with the results. Only rarely had I to resort to Google search (!g).

During the last month or two, however, I've found myself using the !g switch and Google search more than half of the time. DuckDuckGo shows no or few results where Google shows more (and useful) ones.

Still I don't want to give in. So:

  • Have you also experienced this worsening of DuckDuckGo?
  • Which other more privacy-respecting alternatives do you recommend?
102 comments

  • 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.

      • Interesting, verbatim searches work perfectly for me. Maybe it's some search engine that doesn't support them? I personally have bing/google/duckduckgo selected.

        • No, I stand corrected: the summary/snippet wasn't showing some of the quoted search words, but the page had all of them. Well done SearXNG.

102 comments