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?
The vast majority of the quality comes from the result ranking (that is what people generally refer as indexes albeit indexes are slightly different conceptually). In practice there are two main indexes/ranking (a) Google (b) Bing. DDG, Ecosia, yahoo are, at best, tuning the ranking (not sure if they make things better or worse with that).
This is the reason if you want meaningfully better quality you need searXNG. Because combining results from multiple search engines you grt both main indexes.
There is a ranking/quality problem there as well because how do you join the results of multiple search engines? I think it simply uses a “voting” system where it bumps the results from most search engines. This also means that you want a “balanced” number of search engines based on Google and Bing otherwise you’ll get mainly Google or mainly bing results. Or you may just enable only Google and Bing, really 🤷♂️
If there will be new indexes (e.g. the new European one) you may want to enable them as well but this kind of problems take time to become competitive with giants like Google and Bing (albeit with enshittification this gap is being reduced)
(Oh and of course if you don’t want to self host and you don’t want your queries to be proxies by random Joe with the public instances, go for the engine you want to “donate” your attention to. I would go for Ecosia just because they seem the most ethical of all, including DDG…. But your choice)
Thank you for the explanation about rankings, and the SearXNG suggestion. I’m trying it now and it looks promising!