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?
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.
Right on. I’m running searxng and whoogle. Whoogle is a low resource option, and it only sources Google. I like searxng for the deep results, all kinds of weird stuff pops.
I was recently recommended to check out YaCy. Haven’t done it yet.
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.
It’s an old problem. From the very start of the net, you had to sort the wheat from the chaff. Back then, the BS was human-generated. Now we have the addition of AI crap. But anyway, they solved it already. Its called wikipedia. (Or any other community curated data source as well.) I’m not some wiki fan, but that’s the world’s answer to encroaching bad data. An army of real, very corruptible, infighting, weird-as-hell wiki editors is our last stand against the BS.