I ask because I’ve been doing a lot of research the last few weeks and Google search has really let me down. I’ve been finding better results on DuckDuckGo and Bing. Is this a recent thing with Google or am I out of the loop? Any other search recommendations?
Edit: In no particular order, some recommended alternatives to Google
SearXNG
Whoogle
Ecosia
Brave
Dogpile
DuckDuckGo
Kagi
Swiss Cows
Qwant
Bing
DuckDuckGo uses Bing results. Also DuckDuckGo is not your friend.
I personally use SearXNG for best results. Public instance list.
That article is about their web browser. Agree that it doesn’t exactly instill confidence that their search engine is squeaky clean. Regardless, DDG results are much more useful than Google results, as the entire first page isn’t ads.
This. It was an interesting read and gives me doubts, but it’s undoubtably better than using google and I can set it to my default search engine in safari
«DDG results are much more useful than Google results» – not if one is searching in anything but english; not sure for english either (had very poor results myself whenever i tried it) but at least can’t disprove it.
I honestly went back to Google after seeing every fucking link in DuckDuckGo behind MSN. Almost every alternative search has Microsoft’s claws in them.
Glad to see a potential alternative in SearXNG. Thanks for the info.
same here (concerning going back to google every time); unfortunately can’t share optimism for searxng: afaiu it’s not a search engine but an aggregator/frontend, i tend to get all the same sh*t with it no matter which combination of search engines / settings i tried. finally just gave up for the moment with an internal promise to do more testing in a year or two.
Yeah although this is specifically the Duckduckgo web Browser rather than their search site. The only web browser to use is Firefox, set up the privacy and tracking settings correctly plus add in privacy extensions.
Duckduckgo website doesn’t track you in the same way, but still it is a company and should not be treated as a virtuous entity.
My site doesn’t seems to be index. Is there a way to let SearXNG instance know about my URL?
It doesn’t crawl the sites itself, it just parses the rusults from all the existing search engines and combines them.
Ask Google and Bing to index your site.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289#request_indexing
https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/url-submission-62f2860b
DuckDuckGo is not your friend
please, PLEASE, never forget that the CEO of DuckDuckGo is also the founder of the “Names Database”. it is insane to me that anyone trusts DDG. where do you think they get all the money for marketing from? i’ve seen a DDG ad on a fucking bus stop in the middle of nowhere
edit: throwing in an honorary mention for Qwant, which is an EU-based privacy-oriented search engine. i’ve been using them for a couple of years now and have yet to hear anything bad about the company. SearX is also supposedly a safe bet