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Alternatives to Google as a Search Engine?
Looking for something along the lines of DuckDuckGo and other privacy focused search engines. Any Tildoes have a go-to, non-censored, privacy focused search engine?
Looking for something along the lines of DuckDuckGo and other privacy focused search engines. Any Tildoes have a go-to, non-censored, privacy focused search engine?
You mention DDG... Is there something wrong with DDG?
The results are pretty shit compared to Google. I used DDG exclusively for about 6 months, just ended up banging "!g" at the end of every query by the end.
On Google if I search for "python" I'm going to get pages and pages of information about programming. On DDG if I search for "python" I'm going to get some pages about programming and some pages about snakes.
Google seems so good BECAUSE it lacks privacy. Your Google search results are based on a profile that Google has built for you. DDG, by design, doesn't do this.
This search profile is called your filter bubble. Sometimes, its useful (searching for technical data). Sometimes is detrimental (it tends to show you only opinions and views that match your own). I try to keep this in mind when searching and use Google or DDG accordingly.
I just searched Python on DDG and received pages of information about the programming language and none about actual pythons. I find DDG is usually very good when it comes to programming-related searches and I haven't needed to go back to Google after >2 years of DDG. The image search can be rather lacking sometimes however.
I guess I'll have to give DDG another go. Its been a couple years since I gave them a shot at full time search replacement. Thanks for the info.
Opposite for me, DDG provides me pages of relevant info for my programming questions, while Google... is not bad, but no better then DDG in terms of relevancy for the most part. Plus DDG has nice built in tools like being able to search color codes and receiving visualizations of that and relevant colors, which Google still lacks. Honestly Google's results seem to have gotten worse and worse over the years, I find myself sometimes going to the second or third page before I find what I'm looking for, while 4 or 5 years ago I would get it as the first result. This combined with all the sketchy shit they've been doing made me really dislike their service, the last straw for me was when they removed the 'view image' button on image search because shutterstock raised the slightest hint of legal action (and to this day people still blame shuttershock instead of Google, the ones who actually removed it).
Good to know. Like I said to @rndmprsn, its been a while since I tried DDG as my sole search engine. Sounds like its time for a another go!
what are you searching for? I don't think I've ever needed to go beyond the first page. Honest.
But !g gives you the privacy you’re concerned about, right? FYI, it’s really hard to compete with Google, esp. if you need to make money somehow and also maintain your user’s privacy (i.e., not sell their search history). I use DDG regularly and I too have fallen back on Google, but I think DDG is your best bet. I’d be curious if anyone else knows of alternatives as well.
Maybe not anymore. I believe DDG used to make the query on your behalf from an anonymous profile, but I guess that’s changed?
That’s what it does by default - in fact, it uses many different search engines. The Google bang just redirects you to a normal Google search.
It definitely doesn't, it's just a redirect to Google. What you really want is "!s" for StartPage, which proxies all requests through their servers to google.
TIL. Thanks.
I'm content with DDG's results except for programming-type queries. Then I break out the !g. I make use of a lot of other bangs as well - !wa, !gh, !b, !yt.
I came to DDG for the privacy, but I stayed for the bangs. I don't think I can ever use another search engine without them.
I used to have a bunch of search engine shortcuts set up in Opera, before I found out about DDG and !bang. I was rather upset to see that browser go to shit.
I think a terminal type of search would be quite interesting, however results would be awkward to parse. Unless you mean that you could just do the searching in a terminal-like interface in which case never mind.
I use the searchonymous plugin for Chrome and Firefox to keep me signed into Google's services like gmail and maps but when searching it keeps me logged out. Pretty cool plugin.
I’ve used it for quite a while and didn’t really notice any difference with the results other than that it doesn’t exclude them due to DMCA takedowns. In any case, if you need Google’s results, try !s instead for StartPage. It’s another well-known private search engine that anonymously scrapes its results from Google.
Not particularly...just wondering if anyone has other options.
Startpage is a good one, it anonymizes your query before going to google, so you get most of Google's good results with privacy.
I also use StartPage but the only problem I have with it is that it cant't be a long term solution. We cannot expect people to stop using Google and then use a search that anonymizes Google searches.
I use the searchonymous plugin for Chrome and Firefox to keep me signed into Google's services like gmail and maps but when searching it keeps me logged out. Pretty cool plugin.
It's also possible to use Startpage from within DuckDuckGo by using the !sp bang before your query.
As others have mentioned, you can use the !sp bang in duckduckgo to get startpage results.
Ecosia is another one: https://www.ecosia.org/
But they also plant trees.
That makes it sound like a negative? I think that is a great idea.
I meant it as a positive. It's just what separates them from other search engines, that's why I used the 'but'.
Neat idea, but I'm always hesitant to turn off my adblock. How intrusive are the ads? And how much does ecosia respect your privacy?
Quote from their site:
Also, according to their FAQ, if you have do not track enabled in your browser, nothing about you will be stored. They also don't store your IP address no matter what.
Their ads are also nice. Every ad has an "Ad" prefix. And are only placed at the top or bottom of the search results.
Good to hear. I'm pretty attached to duckduckgo at the moment, but I'll give it a try for a bit. It's certainly a neat idea.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned searx yet. I'm hosting an instance of it on my own domain, for those who want to try it out.
It's officially a metasearch engine, which basically means it uses the results from many other search engines to try and yield the best results. You can
I liked searx, but the default provider went down. They emphasized how users are not to use the "test" one as their go-to, but I still switched away from it when they went down for some hours. Didn't have resources to host my own or the loyalty to find another host.
DDG and StartPage are the two best options I am aware of.
There is findx, although I haven't used it enough to speak about its quality, it doesn't do tracking, similar, in that regard, to duckduckgo.
I love DuckDuckGo. The improved privacy is awesome, but the bangs and instant answers make it way better than alternatives. I have ran into some trouble when looking up particularily obscure programming/academic things, and when that happens, I just use the StartPage bang (!sp) to search "Google" (anonymously).
I was/am a huge fan of Seeks, which is unfortunately dormant now.
Seeks – as opposed to most other (meta)search engines – put the user first in the sense that instead of you trying to figure out how to query, it tried to support you in searching. The idea was a kind of a distributed (P2P?) search where users, who would search for similar things, could help each other online as well. It was a meta-search engine, but its main goal was to end up with web/content servers to push metadata instead of spiders crawling and pulling it.
It was perhaps too ambitious too early, but the way it worked already back then, was much more pleasant to use IMHO.
e.g. you searched for “jaguar” and instead of the engine guessing whether you mean the animal, the car, gaming console or whatever else, it could group the results into clusters of similar hits – “animal”, “car”, “gaming console”, “sports team” etc. If you chose one cluster, it would simply drop all the other irrelevant clusters.
It also didn’t list all the vaguely relevant hits, but just the ones that were relevant enough. So by default, it would show you only things that are actual hits, and the list was much shorter than e.g. on Google. If that didn’t help, there was a button to make the search more or less fuzzy. This was particularly practical if you already knew that you don’t recall the exact match, but could describe it somehow – in that case you already started with fuzzy matching and quite often what you were really searching for popped up already somewhere on the first or second page of the hits.
Great stuff, I miss it …I’d be actually willing to pay for the development to continue.
DuckDuckGo is privacy focused and has bangs.
Startpage uses Google results, but without tracking.
Searx is a meta-search-engine-aggregator-thing where you can turn various engines on and off, also privacy focused. I've gotten very detailed results with it compared to DDG.