I’ve been using duckduckgo for years now with no issues, but today I opened it and realized there were no longer any search results before scrolling. It was all ads/info cards. So I guess I’m looking for a replacement. Any suggestions?
Related: anyone know if there’s a way in the Adnauseum Firefox extension to hide ads on a specific trusted site? I like their goal of not punishing ads following the do not track standard, but DDG has crossed a threshold and I now want to blacklist them specifically.
OP, please reword the title to be a question. Thanks.
I’m partial to ecosia.org myself. Search while helping to plant more trees!
I do wonder how they get the money to plant these trees, hmm…
edit: oh, look at that! Even ecosia started getting into AI. Truly impossible for search engines not to get into AI territory these days, funny right? Even kagi did.
If you self host, you could try searxng
SearXNG Public Instances List or self host it yourself.
You can turn those info cards, ads, and some other stuff off in the settings fyi
Yeah, not sure how this isn’t near the top.
Wait you can really turn the ads off?
Settings > General > Advertisements > Off
I still much prefer using one of the public Searx instances though
Out of interest, has anyone here been using Kagi? It’s a premium search engine, which means it has reasons and resources to not suck, in theory. Kind of interested in trying it, but not sure how good it actually is.
I tried Kagi and found the results to be significantly less helpful than Google. Searches for local businesses, open source libraries, and Canadian history missed useful sites that Google provided.
I guess I’m an outlier, because other people seem to have a good time with it.
Not doubting you here, but I just tried searching for two very different terms on DDG on two different devices (Windows laptop and Android phone) and two different browsers (Firefox and Brave), and I didn’t really see any ads or dodgy stuff.
The mobile Firefox version had a couple of main links at the top (they don’t look like ads), and some news cards under that. But the links were all relevant. The desktop DDG was super clean, again no ads.
This was without ad blockers enabled too. I also tried it in private mode, and still clean.
What am I missing? Why is my DDG experience so clean compared to yours?
This was the worst time I’ve seen. Here’s a screenshot. The search term was benaroya hall if you want to try yourself.
Wow. Yeah that sucks!
It really caught me off guard. I had another search later today after I posted this that only had one Ad at the top, so it seems like it depends on the search term. I’m not thrilled this is even possible though 😒
Ahh okay. That would explain it. Yeah, it’s disappointing that DDG is selectively selling out. I get that they need to make money. But the content in that screenshot you shared is just ridiculous.
I second this. DDG, Searxng and various LLM are my daily drivers depending on the queries. I don’t recognise DDG being bloated with ads like Google. I have adblockers but I put sites like DDG on the whitelist because hey support the good guys.
Is it topical? Regional? Does OP have malware that is transforming the browser document? Is OP searching for niche content and confusing singular domain results for ads? Has DDG shifted owners and doing some tests?
I would like to know more.
DDG is not any better than bing. If you are willing to give your data to the “good guys” so they can make money with your data, you ultimately failed at protecting your privacy.
Check out Kagi. It’s a paid search engine. I’ve been using it almost half a year now and really enjoy it.
What about it is worth paying for?
Kagi is simply SearXNG backend with a pretty UI. Nothing it provides is unique or something you cannot get elsewhere for free and most times better.
It literally uses Bing and Google indexes and is functionally no different than DDG except for the ability for you to pay them money to quality control the search results for them, which is extremely dumb because they are essentially making you pay them for you to do a job for them.
Avoid it unless you have money to waste for aesthetics like Apple fanatics.
Agreed.
I’ve been testing other search engines, and I found that SearX/SearXNG and Mojeek both turn up results for smaller websites that Google puts in 50th place for the exact title of the website/page.
That sounds like a big plus. Someone else said this was some self hosted thing though which is over my head unfortunately
There are public instances: https://searx.space/
This is one someone previously suggested, and the one I tried that seems to work well: https://search.disroot.org/ - I see it’s not in the list above though. Not sure why.
I mean, Kagi is just the best. I remember trying it like a year ago and I just forgot to switch back to anything else. It’s that good.
Yeah, but for those on a budget that subscription is a pain point. So long as you can afford it easy it is good because you are no longer the product, but that will keep allot of people at bay.
Read about it here, tested it, and was hooked on the first search. It’s magnificent.
Startpage is good, anonymized, and respects privacy. You will encounter ads and cards, but they can be blocked. Fully usable and functional with or without an account. It is also themeable with a dark mode. Results are pulled from Google, but DDG’s results were pulled from Bing and anonymized.
Since I started using it I raaaaarely open Google’s search.
