This is a copy/pasted message I wrote up on another thread. As long as there are people in the comments shilling kagi, I will shill my prefered engines. At least my suggestions will bring awareness to free as in freedom projects. I hope to god people paying 10$/month just to not get datacucked by search engines will also learn something and save their money.
SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.
I personally trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, whos server is located on the other side of the planet, with my query info over Google/Alphabet any day.
Its nice to be able to email and have a human conversation with your search engine provider thats just a knowlegable every day joe who genuinely believes in the project and freely dedicates their resources to it. Consider sending some cash their way to help with upkeep if you like the services they provide, they will probably appreciate and make use of that 10$ better than kagi.
Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn’t seem to give good results try a few others.
Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query
search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won’t index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you. Its also open source and self-hostable
Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses peer-to-peer technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to both run their own local instance and help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets.
They have a public instance available through a web portal. To be upfront, YaCy is not a great search engine for what most people usually want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But, it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine looks like untainted by SEO scores or corporate money-making shenanigans.
I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I know these options are so unknown to most people.
Thank you! So I can use Google but stop it from doing the CAPCHA shit repeatedly because it detects my VPN? It’s abuse of the user and I’m tired of it.
Yup! Enjoy :)
I rage quit Google search the other day over that damn captcha
I’m trying Startpage until I get those alternatives down
I’m sure that’s what Google wants. You can either give them your data or you can go somewhere else, but hopefully you choose to give them your data because they make it too inconvenient not to.
Abuse of the user 🤣
Have you seen users privacy settings? They want their data to be harvested. Now come here and let me give you some sponsored content.
I use Kagi right now but search.marginalia.nu and YaCy seem really cool. Hell, I might package YaCy and write a module for it for NixOS :^)
I’m trying Kagi now but I’m having mixed feelings. Search results are mixed at best for some pretty commonplace topics (e.g. Starfield quests or breaking news).
Also, the search limit (for the trial and basic plans) stresses me and I find myself second guessing whether I really need to search for something. I like it but I haven’t come across a “wow!” moment that makes me want to abandon DDG, despite the transparency and privacy-focus.
what transparency and “privacy focus” are you talking about?
They haven’t released a single line of code and they required you to be logged in, which makes you uniquely identifiable, and if you paid using credit card, then you gave away your personal identifiable information.
datacucked
uuuuusing it
When you need a scalable service for tons of users, federated isn’t going to cut it. This is why Apple wants DDG. Point the bajillion crApple lusers at one of your public instances (or even all of them chosen at random each time) and watch it crash and burn overnight. DDG has tons of servers and the infrastructure to hold up while a ton of people search why their luxury device is slowing down every time Apple releases a new one.
Lol Federation is the definition of scalable. Everyone serves their local users -> a miniscule amount of global traffic, everything but auth always stays local.
Universities have been doing it since the beginning of the internet. Email is the biggest example but there are others: eduGAIN and eduroam are the most notable ones coming out of the academic community.
You are confusing a network of distinct servers with a single point of entry that a search engine would need to be. There is no fallback or distribution of search when everything is directed to a single search point, and pointing people to different search sites per search will remove any per-site preferences.
Do people think about what they say any more, or do they see someone who is trying to carefully explain their problem and just go into pure rage and try to disprove them by spewing things that do not make any sense?
No search engine has a “single point of entry”. Every search engine has Cache servers all over the world at almost every major IXP. Nothing would prevent a federated service from operating the same way. Cloudflare or literally any form of loadbalancer or load balancing service could be used to redirect queries to fedisearch (or whatever the service name would be) to the local instance by IP geolocation. Authentication can just be forwarded to the home server via SAML, thats also where the settings can be stored and queried at login time by the local instance. SAML assertions are very scalable, and there needs to be no global login server, since every users login query can be forwarded to his home instance, where his profile is loaded. The full search index could be put into a blockchain that every local instance joins - every instance crawls their area and publishes new results to the chain. You seem to know very little about how the internet works, yet you accuse me of raging.
That the foss community can manage things like that has been proven for years. Debian mirror server network works in a similar way (they run their own loadbalancer ofc), while being cryptographically secure. And if you wanna see a federated login network like i described in action, just go to https://pubs.acs.org/action/ssostart
All these parts i described are existing technology and in global use. The combination is not, but there is nothing that would prevent a foundation from implementing search like this.
My issue with SearXNG is that I cannot natively use it on mobile (iOS). Might be a small issue for most but I need to be able to type into my browser’s search bar and it utilize that search engine. Open browser > navigate to search homepage > enter query is a lot slower, especially if I am out and about and need information quickly.
If there is some way to configure this I’d love to hear about it, but Safari on iOS limits you to a handful of search engines. I use DDG today.
I did a quick search and found instructions to what I think you are asking for hopefully this helps. The query string for paulgo.io is “https://paulgo.io/search?q=”
I have also heard Xsearch works
searchengine.party also has the query string links for a multitude of different search engines, as well as a comparison of security tests and privacy policies and other functions
Hey just to update I heard XSearch works if that other thing didn’t work out
xSearch on the AppStore lets you use any search engine with Safari.
I don’t know what the fuck is going on with Kagi on Lemmy. They must be using bots or paying people for promoting them. I just don’t get how people can trust them so much when they haven’t released the code for anything, they require you to be logged in which makes the user uniquely identifiable and therefore could easily correlate your searches to your identity (even if they claim not to, it’s just a “trust me, bro”)
Yeah it’s ridiculous, seems like there’s a shill army of this proprietary service here.
shilling kagi
Shilling means that you’re claiming people (like me) who’ve been recommending Kagi are in fact secretly paid to do covert advertising.
Are you using that word wrong, or do you actually believe that we’re all liars?
Saved. Thank you for your time and thoroughness!
thank you, great post
Would also recommend whoogle. They have done public ones iirc but also hand a self hosted option (that I use behind a VPN) for those that line self hosted shit
i have tried these alternate search engines and I have to always come back to google. A friend I trust a lot swears that kagi is the best search engine, and so do other people I know, so it must have some merit.
Wow, USB-C and DDG in the same year? Look at Apple trying to stay relevant 😉
They didn’t switch to USB-C out of the goodness of their hearts. They switched because the EU passed a new law that requires that new smartphones have USB-C ports.
And they actively fought against it for as long as they could, tooth and nail.
It’s an uphill battle, why would Apple bother when just using USB-C makes sense and saves them their lawyers sanity?
Money.
Now that USB-C is the required cable, people can go out and buy any cheap cable they want. The law turned a proprietary cash cow into a low return commodity item.
This argument always cracks me up. I have been able to buy cheap lightning cables effectively since they started making lightning cables lol. It’s not like Apple somehow locks the phone from charging, physics is still a real thing and electricity can still flow through them, even without the MFi aspects.
If you wanna hate Apple for being a massively bloated and money-hungry corporate nightmare, that’s fine, I’m with it, but do we really all think they made it to $3 trillion valuation on… fucking cables??? 😂
Yeah but there has to be some reason they were so opposed to this. I don’t get it either though.
Yeah but there has to be some reason they were so opposed to this.
Because Lightning came out years before USB-C was ready and is already an established de facto standard. There are well over a billion devices in use right now with Lightning ports on them, and billions of Lightning cables. You’re balancing the advantages of switching to a “standard” against the reality that their customers already have Lightning stuff. I went several years with my Switch as literally the only thing I owned that used USB-C. Even now it’s still common for gadgets to ship with micro-USB. USB-C has taken a long time to reach real ubiquity.
Lightning is also physically smaller and easier to plug in than USB-C.
Anyway, the point is that USB-C was not (and is not) this significantly, obviously superior experience for Apple’s existing customers. There are real, tangible downsides that make it more expensive and more environmentally wasteful for at least hundreds of millions of iPhone users who will be upgrading.
Apple wants to keep selling overpriced cables to losers.
If they were really fighting it that hard they could’ve stalled till 2025 when the EU law actually takes effect.
Nah, the design specs for phones like this are done years in advance.
So wait…. Are you suggesting they were already planing to switch before the EU law was passed?
They could have, but I think they saw the demand and speculation of a usb-c phone. Maybe they realized that the bad image it would give them if they held out.
I’ve been waiting for a usb-c phone to upgrade. I’m at a point now that I really can’t wait any longer for a new phone. If they did not release a usb-c phone this year, I would have just bought the cheapest phone they offered.
Why keep giving money to Apple if you are already aware of their tactics?
If the choice is paying unreasonable prices for Apple’s overpriced proprietary nonsense or reducing my yield as another data cow in Alphabet’s surveillance capitalism human farming machine, I begrudgingly pick the former.
I think it’s safe to assume all corporations publicly traded are equally greedy, regardless of how much their marketing department assures us that they exist for altruism.
Shareholders don’t by stock to make the world a better place, they invest in the companies sending the largest dividend checks. Apple and Alphabet are equally covetous of our money (money and data for Alphabet), but I trust the old business model of selling hardware more than giving up my data forever to be used for anything in the future.
GrapheneOS is my true preference currently for personal use and it feels good to leave a corporation in favor of a community, much like my switch from Reddit to Lemmy. As the techie in my family and friend group I’m still going to have to recommend iOS to most people since using GrapheneOS as a daily driver is a big ask for my grandmother.
I have to give graphene a try next year.
Same reason that people stick with Google.
After years in the eco-system it is obnoxious to swap, and the other main competitor isn’t any better of a company to deal with.
At least with Android I have options. Do I want USB-C? There’s a phone for that. Do I not want USB-C (for some weird reason)? There’s a phone for that.
Apple will never do anything for any other reasons besides: regulation and profit. They try and foster this image of humanitarianism and ethics, but meanwhile they build everything in sweatshops and make their own “standards” so that their loyal customers can only use the functions they need by purchasing additional dongles.
I’m happy that they were forced into an actual standard, but I’ve already heard at least two apple users IRL claiming that USB-C is inferior for [insert random reasoning here]. Apple has cultivated the idea that they are above standards for a long time and it will take a long time to break.
You mean, just like every company that exists?
Apple is a corporation with a market cap that rivals the GDP of France and a net income that rivals the GDP of Qatar. That much capital consolidated within a singular private entity doesn’t just make them any other company. Their profit seeking is wildly, wildly different than a vast majority of any other company today.
Get your head out of your ass. ALL companies will never do anything for any other reason besides profit. The size of said company doesn’t matter. A small company will fuck over its customers just as quickly if you let them.
The size, profits, and overall global reach of a company heavily impacts how that company further impacts the world. Do you honestly think that, I don’t know, American Girl dolls have had the same negative impact on the world as the East India Company?
This is just the “both sides of the same” argument with different dressing.
It’s as false here as it is there. So you’re going to tell me a company like fairphone is as unethical as Apple or Samsung?
Yes of course they work with two completely different yields but that’s really the point The only way you can get to that yield is to be unethical so choose smaller brands choose ones that make decisions you agree with and help them grow.
There is no completely ethical capitalism but there definitely are choices that get us somewhere better.
So you’re going to tell me a company like fairphone is as unethical as Apple or Samsung?
Absolutely. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and even fair phone is profit driven. Even NPOs are profit driven. No one works for a loss in western society. No one. So literally every company will do everything it does for the sake of profitability. Even fairphone.
You have to realize that fairphone’s whole model is a marketing gimmick. Does it happen to align with some good values? Sure, but it’s still a gimmick to separate you from your money at the end of the day.
Apple fanboys are the most frustrating people to talk to.
They find any illogical reason to justify what apple does.
Go on. What does Apple do that is uniquely Apple that fanbois justify?
You are my example. You see how defensive you got when I criticized apple?
I asked for an example or two. If that’s your best example of frustrating irrationality-pfft. :)
What about having the ability to sideload apps?
So many people are hard against that even though they are not being forced to use it.
Pot, meet kettle.
I know. That’s my point. A great example of this is when they used to brag about how eco-friendly their product were. I remember them bragging about their displays being mercury-free, BFR free, etc and their laptops having totally recyclable aluminum and glass enclosures - only to later deliberately make their laptops nearly impossible to repair and upgrade.
I’m cracking a joke
Ah.
Ah yes, the second largest company in the world “trying to stay relevant”
Im not really brand loyal to a gizmo company but the way android users are so insecure makes me never want to get them.
What is your argument for calling 70% of all phone users insecure?
Like this response is a good example of the insecurity im talking about thanks
How is that a good example of insecurity of any kind?
This is hilarious because there’s a comment just above yours that’s exactly the same, just turned on its head.
I said it to the android guy and I’m gonna say it to you: pot, meet kettle.
You have truly defended your gizmo company sir, a true white knight of fair google. Not cringe at all
Lmao, I’m an apple user, all in on the ecosystem from phone to smarthome.
Good try though.
Lol what made you conclude that OP uses Android?
I never mentioned OP
Then why gratuitously bash android for some weird user-related reason?
Im not bashing android i have to use one of their devices for work; it’s ok. The users on social media with the vitriol for apple and their need to defend android is really cringe.
I hear ya. To be honest, I don’t really engage in such types of discussions - in terms of phones, gaming, browsers, hell, even movies!
Those kind of vitriolic discussions are led by a minority group who has nothing else to do in life but post stupid comments on the internet.
I could say the same about apple users. But then I go to the real world and notice that the vast majority of people couldn’t care less about such dick- (or pussy-) measuring shenanigans.
* In terms of profit, after the Saudi Arabian Oil Group. Huh, I had no idea.
Of all of the things that I vastly prefer since moving to Lemmy from reddit, anything related to Apple is not one of them. I’m actually surprised because talking about anything Apple on reddit was always a circlejerk pitchfork parade, but Lemmy still seems to outdo. The “trying to stay relevant comment” is honestly hilarious. Sure, the richest company with more than 50% of the smartphone market, that basically feeds design to the rest of the industry is trying to stay relevant.
And another thing worth addressing, It’s probably 50/50 whether the EU is forcing them to USB-C, or just providing cover for them to move to USB-C. Modern Apple (after 1997) rarely has used proprietary standards for cables/connectors, and when they have it’s pretty obviously because there isn’t a better option, or more likely, there isn’t an option that is suited to their purpose*. Apple is/was largely the reason we’re even talking about USB, being one of the first to really adopt it. Then the dock connector for iPods, which is probably the most major example of them using a proprietary connector. If you read that link (just wiki) you’ll see that the dock connector did things that no other standard connector did at the time, and it did it in a form factor that would work with iPods. Fast forward 10 years and Apple eats shit in the press for changing to Lightning, which pre-dated USB-C and has obvious advantages over one of the worst computer connectors in modern history - micro-USB**. Apple contributed significantly to the USB-C spec, which includes many of the advantages that Lightning had first, built off of the work they did with Intel in creating another standard, Thunderbolt.
And then on to today, where Apple is “forced” to use USB-C. Again, in 2016, Apple moved all of their high end laptops to exclusively USB-C, for which they would again be pilloried. People are still pissed those laptops dropped USB-A and MagSafe in favor of trying to drive adoption of USB-C and a one-connector-rules-them-all world. They also moved their Pro iPads over to C in 2018. Basically, Apple started moving its high-end, less price conscious customers to C long before legislation was a gleam in anyone’s eye. Their cheaper products (base model iPads) and mass-consumer products (iPhones) they moved much slower on, and even then there were a slate of “Apple keeps changing connectors all of the time!” (twice in 20 years) outrage-bait articles.
Yes, Apple was “forced” to use the connector they created the first design references for (Lightning/Thunderbolt, and to a lesser extend Mini-DisplayPort) and then helped design, then moved to before most, in a bid to stay “relevant” in a field they already dominate.
* Also worth noting that Apple was a main driver of adoption of USB-A, and took heat when they converted iMacs to it over PS/2, far before most PC vendors did.
** This alone, the amount of negative press they garnered, meant that there was likely no way Apple was going to move iPhones off of Lightning for 10 years.
I really really don’t think Apple needs to do much to stay relevant.
Surprised to see so many plugging kagi in this thread. A subscription to search the internet seems crazy to me. Is it that good?
It’s like Google back in 2010. You find stuff you are looking for without pages and pages of ads, spam, and clickbait.
If you hit a domain which is obviously spam, you can block it forever. If you find a domain you really like, you can promote it for future results.
It’s clear that Google’s motivation is no longer to offer good results. It’s to maximise the time you’re on the site, and the number of ads and spam sites you click. Their goal is now, literally, to feed you bad results.
This article is a pretty good summary of why, by Google’s own words, an ad driven search experience will be rubbish:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
Not only does Kagi produce great search results, as good as “old Google” IMO, its business model means the above cannot (or at least, shouldn’t) happen. If it ever changed its model to include ads etc it would collapse so fast.
So for me, unlike the other poster, I’d recommend it to everyone who’s finding the existing search engines are rubbish and full of useless Etsy and SEO etc links.
I can’t find any information about their search engine crawler. Isn’t it standard for search engines to label their crawlers or something?
It’s conventional to do this, but a user agent string is entirely up to the client, and robots.txt is just a suggestion.
So for the best results, you probably want to mock Google’s crawler because it’s suicidal to block that if you want search traffic.
Brave words divorced from reality.
Cable companies wouldn’t insert ads, people pay for a premium experience with cable instead of getting their TV free over the air. If they did people would just cancel and watch free tv.
Then later: Streaming companies wouldn’t insert ads, the ability to watch on your time, terms and without interruption is part of the appeal, if they did their customers would leave them and they’d collapse. It would be the death of any company foolish enough to do so.
🤡
Markets and competition will save us cried the fool with no knowledge of history.
If they grow they need to keep growing, if their results are good enough they’ll introduce “limited” tracking for “trusted partners” with limited ads that are “valuable and relevant”. And from there it can spiral more but you’ve already lost.
As revenue, tracking, taking a big yearly check from Zuck or whoever to share your data with them. It’s a good source of revenue and unless this company is privately financed by one weirdo entirely out of their own pockets they have a responsibility to investors to get them ever increasing year over year returns.
Of course the typical thing to do is to get big enough first like streaming. Train the fool consumers to pay for something they’re getting for free, normalize that, grow, then sock them with ads, tracking, inconveniences and train them to accept more and more of it.
I mean I guess it could happen… so I guess why trust anyone? May as well just switch it all off!
I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone because it’s really expensive, but for me it’s great, and I save at least one hour a day at work since I don’t waste my time filtering the results from DDG or Google.
It’s subjective of course but I’m happy about it so far.
I tried the trial for two days before I bought in and completely gave up google. Kagi is absolutely amazing and well worth the money, not just because there’s no ads or selling of your data, but because the search results are miles better than any alternative now. I have over 50k searches in my google history and at one point in my career I would average around a hundred searches a day. I know what I need from a search engine and Kagi absolutely gives it to me.
Yeah, I scoffed at the idea of paying. And paying $10/mo. Then I used it. And I keep using it. A lot. And now0 looks like I’m going to be paying for it for a while.
deleted by creator
Yeah, it’s very good. Not having results full of shit like geeksforgeeks or Pinterest is nice, but possible with browser extensions. Being able to influence the rank of different sites, to either bubble up or down in your results is one of the secret killer features
Doesn’t Google pay billions to Apple for the top spot? Why would they want to lose that stream of free cash?
If the goodwill they garner from that makes APPL go up because it matches the privacy expectation they are branding themselves with, they might be making even more money anyway.
Exactly. They are trying to win the privacy game, so a small sacrifice now could turn to be quite profitable.
To harm a competitors stock prices more than they are paying out
Could be that Apple will acquire DuckDuckGo. A little hasty to presume it I suppose, but Apple has to wonder how much money they are leaving on the table by taking Google’s payments. If Google will pay them more than $9 billion/year just to be default—what does that say about how profitable Apple’s absolutely huge and locked-in base can be?
Could apple be using the press as part of their bargaining strategy with google over the default search engine fee?
Only always
How is Apple going to monetize DuckDuckGo to make up for that $9 billion, without compromising their other efforts w/r/t user and data privacy?
How much do they monetize Apple Maps for? Sometimes companies just buy something to be a service supporting the thing they actually sell.
Rhey are going to sell ads on Apple maps.
Source?
Edit: I googled it. There is no source, basically just a guy claiming that would be logical for them to do but his timeframe is already proven wrong and Apple hasn’t announced anything.
efforts
I think the appropriate word here is marketing. There’s no real privacy in an Apple device.
A Washington post article I was reading yesterday said google pays apple $19 billion this year to be the default browser on iPhones.
There is a big anti trust case against Google right now and this arrangement with apple is one of the topics of interest. If Google loses they could be forced to stop paying.
Who says they’re not negotiating a larger stream of cash?
With DuckDuckGo?
No, with Google. If Google pay Apple more, they might be more willing to overlook the reasons they’re looking to switch.
This whole thing is just negotiation theater. Apple never intents to switch.
Yes exactly. They just want to adjust the price.
I started using duck duck go a few months ago and have felt like my search results are a lot more useful since.
The maps function on it sucks though
DDG uses Apple Maps.
The maps it used were a lot worse, so this is a recent improvement
I wish they would use leaflet
Duck duck go sucks for porn I stopped using it a while ago. Until they fix that I’m out.
The man has priorities
Bing image search is surpringly efficient for this
Isn’t it the same search index?
Or piracy
Oddly enough I used DDG once for an artist and actually got results meanwhile Google gave me irrelevant shit
I’ve been using it this way for years. I don’t use google products at all now and don’t miss it.
I’ve been using duckduckgo for the last month and change and I’m not really a fan. Especially for things here in Japan, it can give really wonky results (today I was looking for the closest post office and searched ‘\ post office’. It gave me a website to get directions, but no indication of where it might be nor, y’know, even the post office’s website). Google has gotten continually worse for me, but this was, in most cases, just barely as good or worse.
It’s been my default for years. Usually I find what I want. When I don’t, I go back to the search box and put !g at the front, which sends the search to google.
!sp (Startpage) gives you the same results as Google but without personalized ads or ad tracking.
!s is actually enough
Thanks both! Will try to remember this for next time.
To confirm, are you also toggling the Japan region for searches?
I didn’t notice that was a thing, but it defaulted to Japan so we’re safe there.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Oct 4 (Reuters) - Apple (AAPL.O) held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google as the default search engine for the private mode on Apple’s Safari browser, the Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
The details of the talks are expected to be released later this week, according to the report, after Judge Amit Mehta, overseeing a federal antitrust suit against Google, ruled on Wednesday that he would unseal the testimony of DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple executive John Giannandrea.
Apple, DuckDuckGo and Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice in a landmark U.S. trial argued Google, which has some 90% of the search market, illegally paid $10 billion annually to smartphone makers such as Apple and wireless carriers like AT&T (T.N) and others to be the default in search on their devices in order to stay on top.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified on Monday, saying that tech giants were competing for vast troves of content needed to train artificial intelligence, and complained Google was locking up content with expensive and exclusive deals with publishers.
He added that Microsoft had sought to make its Bing search engine the default on Apple smartphones but was rebuffed.
The original article contains 241 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 11%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Duck duck go needs a lot of work to replace Google search.
I’ve used it for years but often I still get the shits and just bring Google up after duck duck go fails to find what I’m looking for.
Huh I’m also a regular DDG user but I never have that experience.
For me the direct opposite is true. About two years ago Google stopped giving me any accurate results, feeding me a bunch of semi-related garbage instead. DuckDuckGo feels like the Google of old: results that actually (literally) contain the terms of the query and not much else. I’d hate using the internet without it.
I felt the same way. Lately, though, ddg has been serving unrelated garbage ads in the middle of my searches. I am now looking for something new. Startpage has some decent results so far…
Yeah, have had a similar experience. I find the more specific or niche a question is, the better google is at finding relevant pages. DDG is perfectly fine the rest of the time, though, so I keep it as the default.
I usually forget I’m using it. Exception is for work - I frequently have to specify
g!to get Stackoverflow results to show up at the top.The android app is nice, especially the app tracking blocker. It takes up the VPN connection tho
Did DDG move away from consolidating results from Google and other engines?
On Safari (iOS), Apple makes it easy to switch. Settings > Safari > Search Engine and select which one you want. I’ve been using DDG not quite a year and at first the change felt a lil jarring, but knowing I’m contributing less to Google’s ad revenue and their long list of privacy violations, I’m comfortable now sticking with DDG. Change isn’t always easy, convenient, or comfortable, but it can be done with just the tiniest bit of effort.
All browsers make it easy. In fact, Chrome on Android is quicker.
Settings > Search Engine > and select which one you want.
Currently you can pick between;
- Yahoo
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo
- Ecosia
That’s not the point at all.
The point is MOST users don’t change it or even know how. I seriously doubt anyone in my family would even know that it is possible, know that there are other search engines, or that Google knowing everything about their searches is not a good thing. And yes they all use Facebook too.🤦♂️
I think the tech community should come to the realization that most people (no, not in your immediate circle which is mostly tech) don’t want choice; they want ease of use, which means guidance.
Why would a person, who can’t differentiate between google, a web browser, an app, or even the internet, want to change their device settings on their own which requires 10 clicks when their experience can be configured by zero clicks by a mega corp? This is a systemic issue in our society and needs to be corrected at school level in some sort of “Social media awareness/IT class”.
I agree completely. The biggest issue is it requires critical thinking which is unfortunately not a common skill. Maybe this is one of the first things that needs correcting.
I would imagine you can add your own in as well, the same as Firefox allows.
Yeah, it’s easy. I recently changed to Kagi. Just had to do a search using Kagi first, then open settings and it was there.
That’s a bit more difficult. It doesn’t allow you to manually type in the address so you need to keep visiting it until Google recognizes that it’s a search engine.
this is a very poor argument. every browser I’ve used, even Chrome, makes it easy to change the default search engine in the settings.
Were they making an argument?
I wasn’t making any argument, merely offering advice how to change something and my experience in doing so. But my comment clearly upset a lot of Chrome users because I mentioned Google not respecting your privacy, which is a given for a lot of companies.
As I understood it, they were implying that Apple’s default is Google but they still care about privacy because they make it easy to switch to Duckduckgo.
I pointed out that this has been an essential feature in web browsers for years.
I wouldn’t agree with that being the correct interpretation, just so you know.
I tried to switch to DDG as my default search on iOS but my adblocker doesn’t block ads on it but it does on google, so I switched back
DDG has a built-in option to determine whether you want to see ads or not.
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Sweet, I can switch back then
I tried to switch but the results were terrible. I ended up on bing which is still inferior to google but better than being google even if it is another behemoth data gathering company. At this point im just trying to stop centralizing who gets all my data don’t lest it’s a bit fragmented.
ddg gets its results from bing, I’d recommend startpage if you want google results while being privacy respecting.
DDG doesn’t solely use Bing, though. From what I understand, it uses Bing + it’s own crawler and algorithm so its results are almost always different than vanilla Bing.
Duck duck go is crap these days, probably since it uses Bing. All I ever get are “7 best ways to…” click bait, probably AI generated “articles”.
I’ve been trying to use DDG but honestly it sucks. I can’t imagine Apple switching to it, it would just make things worse for users, who commonly can’t figure out how to switch defaults. I think it’s just a negotiating point.
Google search has been fundamentally broken for at least two years. When the protests started on Reddit 90% of Google’s search results we’re broken.
I found this too. After the reddit fiasco, I found DDG to have no downside. The search syntax is a little different (google’s is better) but the outputs arent radically different.
What difficulties are you finding with it and are you switching from Google? The results are as custom as Google given they haven’t scraped your life history so wondering if that’s it? I’ve been using DDG without any issues. About once every 6 months I struggle to find something so try the Google bang but have never found better results. In fact, I was shocked last time how crap the Google results were, just full of AI generated crap and SEO based crap.
To be honest, DDG is also struggling with that now as it’s based on Bing. I have been trying a public searxg but not found it very good so far.
I love DDG and use it as my default, but there’s no doubt that its index is shallower and its semantic matching can’t compare to Google’s. I’m a biogeochemist and spend a lot of time coding in R. Google is just better at surfacing rare science articles/blogs and stackoverflow pages where my query doesn’t match exactly, but it is a relevant result. I use DDG for my personal searching and Google for professional searching
Results suck, it can’t find anything. I really don’t think it’s related to lack of browsing history.
That didn’t stop them from plowing ahead with Apple Maps, even though its debut was total garbage.
Debut and still is garbage.
There’s a reason why Apple users have both installed.
Does Apple Maps even have reviews?
Anyone who thinks Apple Maps is garbage isn’t comparing A/B with Google Maps regularly. At least not in the areas I drive.
Door Dash defaults to Google Maps for directions, and when I Dash and use Google the routing is always poor and seemingly unaware of construction, road blocks, and traffic jams. It also sometimes asks me to make turns in places that aren’t streets and recommends U Turns where they are illegal. I’ve encountered none of that with Apple Maps.
Apple tried to get me to turn into a dead-end, concrete wall once. Never used it again. But that was years ago, so if they’ve improved that’s great to hear! Google Maps plays this game where it tries to act as traffic control. It’ll only show options for paths I know to be super crappy to take at certain times of day, but won’t show an alternate (not so secret) path I KNOW to be better. I’ll start heading the alternate way and lo and behold, it cuts off 5 mins or whatever from the ETA. So stupid.
Sometimes I’m too lazy to copy and paste an address into Google maps, and use Apple Maps. Every time I regret it. And exactly the opposite of what you said apple fails to see road closures and detours. While missing so many other things google has had for 15 years.
I primarily use it. What sucks about it? It isn’t as flashy without those little quick answers that Google throws together, but those are garbage a lot of the time anyway imo. Otherwise, I don’t really have any issues finding what I need that I can think of
I find the results suck donkey balls.
