So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years.
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are, and how it’s trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
How long has Google been this bad?
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
If you’re using DDG for privacy, then indeed you are wrong.
It may be “less invasive” than google, but it’s neither anonymous, nor private.
Here’s a bunch more reasons from techrights.org, a site dedicated to digital freedom and exposing corruption.
Direct privacy abuse:
DDG was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.
DDG’s app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (reaction).
DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)
DDG is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers.
When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default browser.
DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium."
CloudFlare:
DDG promotes one of the largest privacy abusing tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity.
Full article: http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/
ETA: The bulk of the text in my reply was lifted from a reddit comment. I tried to format my comment to reflect that it’s a “quote”, alas I’ve failed. Hence this.
Also, I don’t have a card in this game. I understand anonymity and privacy - I dislike intentional deception.
What to use them, if not DDG
I’m currently using searx.be with good results
Searx improved a lot since I last used it. Was really slow before
Its searxng now (the original searx is dead) and is quite good. Performance differs. I’ve seen very slow instances, but when I started hosting my own semi-private instance, I saw how fast it can be, if the server isn’t a potato.
I’ve collected these 3 so far, but Swiss Cows if you go deep enough uses Bing. I’m not sure about Mojeek or Start Page.
Swisscows does use Bing, Startpage uses Bing and/or Google depending upon where you are, we are fully independent: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ is a visualisation that might be useful
So is Mojeek a standalone since it’s yellow? It looks like a lot of other people use them and not the other way around. Yep is cool, but I think they get their money from the sites that pay them? I looked at it yesterday, it’s sort of a strange set up that I’m not sure I understand.
yes we are indeed a standalone, the sizes of bubbles are reflections of the number of index-usage relationships yep is attached to ahrefs: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/yep-search-engine/ where I can speak to where results come from, I couldn’t tell you about their model
Mojeek gives good results, I’ll keep trying it. I’m not sure about yep though, how do the people get paid? I didn’t see any sign up. It sounds like it’s a platform for their SEO subscribers.
sorry for taking a while to get back but the main source of mojeek revenue is api sales, having people pay to access results for different applications (bing does similar i.e. duckduckgo, qwant, ecosia)
If you have spare hardware lying around and a public IP (or a server anyway), you can selfhost SearXNG.
If you’re fine with paying 12$/month (with tax) for a customizable search engine, very accurate and transparently sourced/quoted LLM, and just a better index than any other search engine I know, use Kagi. I heard some rumors and bad things, but nothing to do with privacy, only the aforementioned tax.
And for a free search engine which claims privacy and is an alternative to DDG, with its own index afaik, Brave.Kagi is anything but private friendly. Their CEO claims only criminals actually want anonymity.
They also think they don’t need pay taxes or to abide by GDPR if they invent their own definitions of the laws.
This is an article often quoted, which makes it seem like it’s a kind of consensus. Yet one of the main points, taxes, can just be disproven by reading the Kagi FAQ about it. Find it by searching “Kagi inc tax” on any search engine, like Kagi itself. Or just https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/sales-tax-vat.html.
We weren’t initially required to collect sales tax/VAT until reaching certain thresholds, typically defined by the number of customers in a jurisdiction or sales volume.
And sooo many other things in this article are purely based on assumptions, incorrect data and misquotes. This personal blog is exactly none better than your average hustle-finance-nazi-bro podcast, in almost all terms (except political views).
Misquotes? There are literally screenshots in the article showing full quotes, I don’t know who are you trying to lie to…
And just because Kagi put some text on their website doesn’t make it true.
Taxes don’t work like that (at least not VAT) and you’re a fool for trusting a company which tried to commit a fraud.Some EU countries do have tax exemptions for small businesses, which Kagi isn’t by any definition.
Anyway, that sure didn’t take long for you to prove Godwin’s law, huh?
Google search peaked in 2014 - that’s when it’d let you do “that movie where [horribly vague summary of an incidental scene]” and get you the answer.
But the complete dropoff started in 2019, when they started letting the ad team remove anti-spam features to game their numbers.
I still find myself trying to search like that every once in a while :(
Personal experience, I can also attest to noticing the issue about 2019-2020.
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are
Interesting, as the incredibly poor results are why I am still not using DDG. It’s like a worse Bing, and Bing is already terrible.
You are btw correct that Google results have gotten worse. There were studies run that confirmed this. The very same studies found that Bing (and by extension ~all third-party engines) have also gotten worse, and faster so than Google. In other words, search as a whole has gone to shit, which anecdotally matches up with my repeated attempts to swap to DDG every 6-12 months that just result in learning to add
!gto every single search, so I might as well skip doing that.I went to StartPage personally.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Read for the exact timeline
For many years now, almost the only way to find tech-related answers was to add the word “reddit” to your search. Before the Rexodus ofc.
Nowadays a lot of people go straight to where they wanted to find info - Wikipedia, StackOverflow, IMDB, etc. - and search from there.
Google itself has admitted how bad it has gotten, and in response they decided to voluntarily reduce their profits and return everything back to when it all worked… - no I’m just kidding, they said wait a bit and AI will save us all, somehow (from ourselves?).
Nowadays a lot of people go straight to where they wanted to find info - Wikipedia, StackOverflow, IMDB, etc. - and search from there.
Didn’t people always do this, though? If I want to find something on Wikipedia, why wouldn’t I search on Wikipedia for it? I have Firefox configured so that it searches Wikipedia when I type “wiki” then a space then the search query.
