Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
In the last couple of months I have noticed an increasing trend of supplying me search results that are completely unrelated to the current query and tie back to my location or previous searches. I can say this with a high degree of certainty this is without a doubt beyond the 100th instance this has happened.
My browser is configured against tracking and fingerprinting (in fact all my devices are) which would make it fairly difficult to retain any data unless they are profiling me.
I've also noticed that if you do a search, click a result, then hit back to go back to the results they manipulate the results in some weird way so they're not the exact same results you got the first time. Infuriating
This is the new quantum search feature: you changed the results by observing them.
Yes! I thought I was losing my mind. I was like "I swear this was the third result but now it's the 5th? Eh, maybe it was the 5th."
Ducks are learning to gaslight people. Fascinating.
Yeah I hate that. Now all results have to be opened in new tabs just in case.
Odd. I wonder what is going on here because when I search that exact same query I get accurate results.
I’ve had iffy search results before but never anything that bad.
I also don’t get the same results. I also have tracking and fingerprinting disabled everywhere.
great. i finally get off google and now duckduckgo is bad. i hate the internet.
It has been doing this shit for a while. Returning results based on just one key word out of many keywords from my query.
Lately they have been even ignoring the restrictive +"keyword" syntax and returning whatever shit just so they won't admit their (or Microsoft's indexer) is shit
What would we suggest as a realistic alternative? Sears? Startpage? Brave? (I am no expert by the way, just looking for tips)
I just switched to using Kagi recently and I like it a lot so far! Theres a free tier for 100/searches a month you can use to figure out if you like it.
Me too. I was so reluctant to pay for a search engine at first since there are good alternatives out there I don't have to pay for. But I just at least wanted to try the first 100 free searches and was blown away by how great it is. It has some unique features like prioritizing or blocking specific domains, lenses and custom bangs. I payed the $10 the same day for Pro tier and 5 days later (yesterday) I even upgraded to Ultimate tier with ChatGPT-4 (called Kagi Assistant). I really, really enjoy Kagi so far. Most probably it's gonna be my one and only search engine for the next years to come.
Searx sucks for images in my experience, startpage was bought by an advertising company, brave is weird for a multitude of reasons but I don't know how good their search engine is as I've never tried it
However I do think that finding a searx instance that works for you and then using another engine like ddg for images is the way to go... You could add a shortcut like ".ddg garbage truck" for easily searching with for example ddg on firefox
How does searx suck for images exactly? 🫠
Also a bit confused by this. I thought the point of searxng is to combine your preferred search engines. So couldn't I just configure ddg for the image results?
Maybe their point was that you cannot filter the images, like by color, size, license, etc
But anyway, if I want to show somebody a picture of something it works perfectly As for the results, they are pretty comparable between searx, ddg, and googlag.
I would even say searx wins on this one because 1. It's easier to navigate and open images 2. The nojs version of the search looks so much better than any other search engine
I've been using metager for some while and really like it. They're also part of an initiative pushing for a free as in freedom search index, so that's nice
Try kagi.com
I you have to pay for it, but t's amazing
I'll take the trial sometime and see if I should drop the cents
Thanks for mentioning Kagi! I've been looking for some Google/DDG replacement but every single one I've tried had some sort of dealbreaking drawback for me. Google collects all my data and heavily filters my results, DDG provides dogshit results most of the time I don't even bother using it, Startpage is awfully slow, and I didn't even get to understand what Searx is as looking for it led me to some random ugly pages.
Subbed for 1 year 10 bucks plan. Works super-fast on mobile too. Hell yeah!
I have searx, and i'm feeling like a god of search, better than google, better that bingbinggo, and anything else Although I had a lot of problems with it when I was hosting it on a RPI and docker, now i'm not, and it's just so much better
What was the problem with Docker? I want to host it myself, the docker option seems to be the easiest one.
I'd guess the RPI part would be the bigger issue.
I have still the same good results in ddg, no matter what device or browser. I have noticed that they have some location bias when ddg (and any other search engine i have tried) has non good results globaly but good resulta locally.
Still better then anything i have tested. Just because there are minor anomalies i will stick with them.
I get the same shit at work where I can't use a VPN: like 7-8 relevant results then basically just ads for local businesses after that.
It's really bizarre that DuckDuckGo doesn't allow you to disable location based results. You can use a VPN, but then you'll start getting location based results on that location instead.
It does though?
Right under the search bar there should be a switch bar to turn on localized search, and a dropdown to pick different location.
Or is it itself location locked?
It only half works, which is really weird.
I stuck a VPN server in the UK and set the DuckDuckGo location to Australia, the only two English-speaking countries I could think of that are roughly geographically opposite from each other.
Then I searched for "local news." Page 1 was all Australia. Then at the end of page 2: BBC, BBC, Guardian, inyourarea.co.uk, BBC, Totton News, Bristol Post.
This might be accidental, but it's still pretty unnerving.
As someone who is a data hoarder/curator and dives into the deep ends of web abyss, I use Searx, Startpage and Yandex. I do not mind Startpage only because I no longer use search engines that much anymore. If something truly needs to be searched, Yandex is the absolute, untouchable king for web, image and reverse image searching, and is better than Google for privacy (very low bar but > Google/Bing).
Searx usually does deliver for the common use cases, and Startpage gives Google results minus SEO and sponsored trash.
If I were to rank them for results based on years of experience, Yandex is easily a 10 (ignoring its unbeatable image search), Searx with "default/all" language results a 7, Startpage a 5 (censors Russian/Chinese sources since it is based on Google), Qwant probably 3.5-4 (unavailable in many regions), Google 3, DDG and Bing 2. I am not sure how Metager, Mojeek and Kagi fare, but they probably perform somewhere between Searx with "default/all" language results and DDG.
Why Yandex is so above Searx metasearch is because its indexing is a lot faster than once a day, besides giving the experience of what Google was around 2009/10 and with no SEO crap. You will find the most obscure personal blog and website there, and DMCA bullshit does not work in Russia, which would work on any of these other search engines or metasearch instance owners.
Yes, I have the same issue with DDG for something like a year now. I can't use it anymore for basic searches, I feel like the bing api they are using is getting worse and worse.
On DDG I can type in an exact company or product name and not get a proper result, it's crazy. Google seems to find the stuff no problem, it's really quite frustrating when the search engine isn't even capable of basic queries.
If you’re looking for a new search engine, I’ve been using paid search provider, Kagi.com, for the last few months. They’ve been great.
Slowly but surely I am coming to the realisation that free services sooner or later will drift away from their privacy claims
Precisely. Ad and user data supported products will always balance making their users happy, with making their paying customers happy.
Pricing seems a bit odd to me What happens if you don't spend all your searches? Does it carry over to next month?
Wouldn't it be better to pay as you go? Without the monthly requirements if they gonna have a limit anyway.
I turned JS off other than for specific websites. This includes DDG. It gives me accurate results, although the other commenters don't seem be facing your problem either
I feel like ddg has never had good search results
I paid for Kagi and have been super happy with it. If you don't mind paying, I highly recommend it. Not having ads or manipulated results is worth it for me.
Same here. Every time I ditch Google and go to ddg, I just laugh how irrelevant all the results are and I continue feeding Google with personal data and telemetry and whatnot.
It is true that even Google's results feel much worse than before but it's still significantly better than ddg.
I feel like Qwant has become the best when it comes to the quality of the search results. My experience with kagi is limited, though.
My browser (Firefox) is configured the same way.
No issues with your search term here. I think you have gremlins.
It might be blindly searching for websites that contain any of the words scan, mark 2, pro.
It seems to do that when it can't find a page with all of the words, and the only way I know to fix it is put the whole thing in quotation marks.
I use DDG, tho' it's with a VPN. And it seems to work just fine. shrug
The time to ditch DDG came when they started gatekeeping during the first Russia thing, COVID, etc.
