Honestly the search bangs are the killer duckduckgo feature. I started using it because I was upset with Google hiding search results, but it's being able to easily search any search engine that keeps me using it.
Honestly the search bangs are the killer duckduckgo feature. I started using it because I was upset with Google hiding search results, but it's being able to easily search any search engine that keeps me using it.
Yeah, but I almost always end up using the !g bang anyway. And its so stuck in my fingers that I sometimes mistakenly write !g wen searchphrase when I want to search on wikipedia. Im cursed.
Honestly I've found that duckduckgo/Bing's results are usually enough, and usually only fallback to Google results if I fail to get anything useful or if it's a very technical query.
What’s that?
Search bangs let you search using any search engine from duckduckgo. So you can type "!g" before your search to search Google. "!w" for wikipedia, "!a" to search Amazon, etc. They have a page on duckduckgo that lets you search all the different search bangs, most every website with a search is included and has multiple search bangs that work. If you don't remember any of the shortened commands, you can usually safely fall back on a longer one (ie if you don't remember !a for Amazon you could do !amazon).
Yeah that's the one thing that really bothers me too.
Yeah im like 99% happy with DuckDuckGo, except for images. The image results are always awful I find, so I just have to open up google images when I need an image. Dont think I can avoid that, but yeah
DuckDuckGo 99% of the time, Google Startpage if I'm having trouble finding something.
*Note: Startpage uses Google as their source of search result.
Big fan of DuckDuckGo and Startpage. Brave Search is also a fine choice, as well.
I use duckduckgo with Google as a backup for when what I'm searching for is too specific. I've had to use Google less and less lately though
Used Duckduckgo for a while, got myself into a spiral of search engine exploration and at some point settled on Startpage for a while...but I just missed the maturity in functionality of Duckduckgo. It just always felt like I was making a usability/productivity sacrifice. So I returned and am still happy ... for now :p
I didn't know DDG introduced that feature. That's sick honestly. They even have bangs for my more obscure wikis.
I had no idea they had this feature. Thank you, I don't think I'll use anything ever again unless I absolutely have to now.
Duckduckgo.com. This is the way.
I use DuckDuckGo, because I really love the "bangs" feature. Want to look up something on the AUR? Use !aur term. Google Images? !gi term, etc. There are tons of them!.
How did I not know about bangs til now, I've been using DDG for years! I've just been relying on the @ codes in the Firefox search bar, which are super limited. Thanks for the tip!
My own SearXNG instance. I get the best out of all search engines.
Kagi is a great premium alternative. They focus obsessively on search result quality and adding helpful, but non invasive AI tools. One of them is even free as an experiment!
FastGPT is fun, I never play with these sort of stuff like ChatGPT before.
Kagi is great for me for 3 reasons:
A lot of things. https://blog.kagi.com/blog
I used DuckDuckGo as my default and it works out for me most of the time. Though, were it tends to fall apart is with image searching. When I can't find what I'm looking for I'll go to Google and find it pretty quickly.
I use Qwant and find it gives me better results than Google most of the time. It claims to be private and such, so I'm happy with it.
Thank you for reminding me about Qwant! I will set it as my default to try it out again. I remember that I did not find it too impressive a few years back. Felt like the exact same results as Bing, even though it supposedly has its own index.
Glad to see someone representing Ecosia in the thread! I was kind of hoping it'd be more popular
I also use "Tab for a Cause" as well and love both. It's nice to feel even just a tiny bit better about my searches
Bing, actually. I think it has greatly improved. Mostly. Plus the new Bing and AI stuff has been great. Much better than google
I also use Bing. I like the AI features and the rewards program. The results are meh in terms of quality, but at this point honestly so are Google's.
The rewards and AI are really the only selling parts. I guess it’s the cost of allowing them your data.
@SillyLilJester @Nymphioxetine
I’d rather google sees what’s going on and stop coasting on search.
The AI part really is what makes Bing great. I noticed that I save so much time by asking programming related question to Bing chat instead of going through a bunch of semi related results. And normal search results are also often fine.
Yes, I also switched to DDG, before there were so many options on the market, and its been more than sufficient since then.
I have a feeling I'm not utilizing search engies as much as I should, as I only use them to navigate to other websites.
The built-in conversion tools are really great, and the Wikipedia info-box has saved me many clicks, but aside from this, I really just need a search engine that works, without selling my data to the highest bidder.
DuckDuckGo is just that for me.
DuckDuckGo. I've become reliant on the bangs. Regular search not giving me what I want? Just add !g. Want to find a word? !wt. Look up an album? !rym. Just want to search something on YouTube quickly? !yt
Same engine, same reason.
Duckduckgo. I stpped using google for the privacy stuff but I stayed because of the language switch.
I don't know if I tweaked a setting to achieve it, but I have a language switch below the search bar. Google always showed me german results when searching for something english and the other wy around, so I love this feature. Search results are good enough for me, so duckduckgo it is.
Brave. It’s interesting getting completely different results than from any of the big players. And the results from Brave are often better.
I use the Brave browser on my phone. The searches are good, but I mainly like that I can watch YouTube without adds, and make the video windowed and even turn off the phone screen while it plays.
I mix and match.
DuckDuckGo is my main one, but I often find myself just using bangs and either throwing in !brave or !g before some searches because sometimes the results aren't as relevant as I'd like.
I obviously don't like Google, but if I need super quick results, they're typically better for me, though they've honestly become ridiculously terrible over the last couple of years.
Not just because of promoted content, but because they don't even seem to care about syntax anymore.
If I put quotes around a search term, Google seems to ignore it. Why? Who knows.
As much as I have... let's say mixed feelings about Brave, I find myself using !brave more and more on DDG. More relevant results, at least in my looooong experience of using DDG as my primary.
Startpage doesn't like me because VPN or whatever, otherwise I'd use it more.
I sometimes use a SearxNG instance as well, but that's only if I'm really struggling to find something.
I use DuckDuckGo and Bangs to whatever I want if I am not satisfied, !g for Google for example
When I setup a new browser, I always delete all the default search engines and install DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant and Startpage. If I'm looking for accurate results, I always use 2 or 3 of these. I can't say I consistently get better results using one or the other.
I use Startpage, a privacy focused search engine which uses Google powerful search engine but without sending the actual data to them. The result are pretty good. You can change both the language and region in the settings. Bad part of Startpage is it is a for profit company (some advertising will be displayed using past search history only)
I use ublock origin and block the ads
I use kagi. It's pretty nice, though it's not free.
Third for Kagi, only been using it for a couple of months and I've not come across anything that it hasn't found, or been unhappy with the results it shows.
Second this -- Kagi has been excellent for me
I’ve been using Kagi for the last year, and when that’s not available, duck duck go or starpage. Kagi is excellent. yes its paid, but imo worth the cost.
I started using Kagi recently and it’s fantastic. The results have been great, it’s pretty customisable and it uses all the same ! bangs as DuckDuckGo. Don’t feel like I have to use Google at all anymore (which wasn’t the case when I used DDG as my go-to). Plus, since it’s a paid service, there are no ads and no guff.
+1 for Kagi.com, been using it for a long while, it rocks and is definitely worth paying for.
I hop between Brave search, Startpage and DuckDuckGo depending on the results I get.
As much as I dislike it, mainly Google still. Sometimes Bing for the AI help. Brave Search is also really good and the only new search engine I can see surpassing Google some day.
Brave's latest update made it so image searches are only through Google or Bing for mr. After seeing this, I've been using ecosia.org and it's fantastic!
Ecosia image search is literally just searching Bing through a middle-man.
Brave search. The results have been better for me than most of the major players, summarizer comes in handy, and the discussions section showing forum posts on the searched for topic + top comment is useful. No native image section, but I work around that by !s bang to search on startpage when I need images. And yes, it has bangs, just like DDG.
Searx. https://xo.wtf
I also use Searx but to be honest I end up using other search engines for 99% of my queries.
I use searx for everything except conversions. For example "!ddg 0.35xmr in usd"
Are you sure? They say that they have their own index. https://about.qwant.com/en/
I'm not sure but I did a experiment in SearxNG enabling Bing, Duckduckgo and Qwant. The 3 returns almost the sme results for several queries. Results from Google are different. I also doubt Qwant has the resources to index the whole Internet.
Been very happy with DuckDuckGo for a while now.
I use Duckkduckgo, I'd like to use Kagi though, From my short experience, the results were excellent and I'd like to curate the websites I like and don't more as I think that would improve things the results even more.
Me too. I prefer to use ddg-lite since I like my software to be minimalist. Ecosia provides good search results(maybe even better than ddg), a lot better than mojeek IMO. I use mojeek to find exotic content.
Today I tried Googling something about following kbin magazines on lemmy and got 0 relevant results on the first page. Then I entered the same search on DuckDuckGo and the first few results were all relevant to my search. Finally I decided to make the permanent switch to DuckDuckGo. Google has been undergoing enshitification for a long time now. Ever since I started needing to include Reddit at the end of all my searches. Since I no longer want to include Reddit in my searches, I need to find a better search engine in general and hopefully DDG can be that.
Ecosia. It's not a great search engine, but it's good enough most of the time, and it plants trees.
It doesn't necessarily return the results I want, though. Possibly because it isn't tailored to me like Google is (thanks, data-scraping!) so sometimes I use Google if I want a search engine to use context.
For example, I couldn't remember the name of the show 'Voltron'. If I search Ecosia for 'cartoon show giant robots made of smaller robots' then I get pictures, or snippets of the phrase 'giant robot' or 'show giant' or whatever, literally looking for it. But then I swap to Google and it uses context to show me Voltron stuff among the results so I can be like YEAH THAT'S IT NOW I can make my extremely topical joke to my friend, thanks
I hear good thinks about Duck Duck Go, it may even use Google's search indexing but it protects your privacy and doesn't track what you're searching. Which is both 'bad' (your results are harder to narrow down obscure searches) and good (general searches aren't contaminated by obscure guesses).
DDG actually uses Bing's search indexing last time I checked! Startpage uses Google's, which the major difference between them. Brave does its own thing, I think.
I use DuckDuckGo. When I first heard about it, I tried it for a bit, found that it didn't really give good results, and switched back to Google. Some years later I found that Google also stopped giving good results, so I figured that if my search results just aren't going to be good, I'll at least switch away from Google.
I use Bing now due to Microsoft Rewards and Bing AI
I've been exclusively using DuckDuckGo until recent controversies, then switched to Metager. It is a privacy-oriented, opensource metasearch engine and they aren't relying on bing/google search results like almost every other search engine.
Results are really good and consistently relevant. But it has some minor annoyances, and recently metager started locking more and more features behind a paywall. I'll keep using it if I won't find better alternative.
My guess is it was the situation where DDG couldn't block Microsoft trackers in their tracking blocker applications (their browser and browser extension and not the search itself), because of the contract they had with Microsoft to use the bing search index for DDG search. I believe the problem was resolved, and never affected the search itself.
I've been drinking the DDG koolaid since 2016/2017 - what's the recent controversies?
Struggling a lot with this lately.
Had been using DDG for years without any problems, but it became unusably bad for me a while ago. Tried Qwant and Startpage, which were an improvement, though not great, then began to struggle with them also.
Briefly had a good time with some Searx instances, but must be doing something badly wrong (or am developing early onset dementia, hahaha) as can no longer get it to work well either.
In short, I can get up Wikipedia entries & usually major websites providing I use a single search term, but can seldom get more complex searches to work no matter what operands I use.
Hoping to find something that suits, as it is quite frustrating.
https://search.brave.com/ really good
Results are very hit-and-miss, but if you're into the whole distributed search engine thing you should give Yacy a try. https://yacy.net/ I ran a node for a long time and as long as you keep feeding the index you usually get decent results for the things you search for often.
I want to like SearX, but I just haven't gotten any great results from it so far, and I'm not really impressed by anything that just spits out Bing results (looking at you DDG).
you.com gives excellent results, but I'm not sure how much I should be trusting them.
Brave search has gotten MUCH better and I use that pretty on the daily now.
I keep seeing good things about Kagi from our Lemmy friends here, thinking I should give that a shot
I recently tried Brave and Duckduckgo, but I always come back to Startpage. It's a little bit slow but search result more satisfied for me.
I use it too for the rewards. I had the exact same thought as you--at least they pay me for collecting data.
Sadly, I use Google. Their query syntax is so good and can be so precise in their results. I wish to get any search engine with that quality in their query syntax.
Yeah, I'll often start with duckduckgo and give it a couple tries if I can't find what I want, but then I go back to Googleand typically find it.
I'm a developer and I've been trying out www.phind.com, has been decent so far. It gives you both a chatGPT/AI answer and a regular search engine result at the same time. Just don't rely on it to write an accurate RegEx...
I’ve been using phone too, it’s definitely recommended a few deprecated ways of doing things and when you click the link to see it’s source it takes you to a GitHub issue saying that the method you are trying to use shouldn’t be used. Otherwise, pretty good
yeah, as with all AI at this point it needs to be fact checked to be reliable. Still gives a pretty decent starting point if you don't already have any idea what you're looking for. Better than Google at least
100%. Especially with things I don’t want to have to dig into the documentation.
I have docker running with docker swarm locally for all my self hosting needs. I couldn’t remember how to scale a docker swarm service without killing existing containers and phind was able to give me the exact command I needed and I avoided having to look at the docker docks
Would https://google.com/ncr help you? It's google "no country redirect"
Startpage primarily because I was told that the Google results are better than DuckDuckGo but I never noticed any big difference except that Startpage has deactivated NSFW content by default. DuckDuckGo feels a little bit snappier and less cluttered tho.
I just recently started using Startpage. The results to me so far seem pretty good but im in a country where I speak the language. And I like that it doesn't save my searches. For that I use DDG.
I use duckduckgo. One thing I notice about the google language is that my phone has french as the os language so google will be in french but then I go to a computer that has english as it's language, sign in and google will be in french (even though my account is set to english). So check your OS and browser language settings on all devices you signed in on.
Brave Search on all my personal devices, even though I'm getting worse results than up to a few months ago, so as much as it pains to admit it I sometimes use Google as a fallback (and the last time I actually used Google as my main search engine was back in 2012!). I probably should use metasearch engines more, though, but have been procrastinating learning how to effectively use them for a while now.
Aside from that, I have about a dozen sites saved with search keywords on Firefox (four of them are Wikipedia in different languages, though) that I use all the time.
Gruble.de, eine Searxng Instanz welche von Adminforge betrieben wird
Mine... One of the SearXNG instances published at https://searx.space.
https://spot.ecloud.global/search a frok from searx by /e/ project.
actually google.
all other search engines give worse results, buggy (I'm looking at you, searx; it fails very frequently), or just have worse ui/ux
but yeah i agree, regional bs is an issue. with region set to Ukraine and searching in English/Ukrainian i get a lot of russian websites for some reason.
I can't stand russian and i fully blocked the whole .ru/.su tld.
They are of no use to me anyway.
google still suggests them even with language filters (lang:...)
I use both startpage and duckduckgo, I use different browsers for different uses. For example: duckduckgo browser for work/professional use, mull for social media, tor for general browsing, I also recently started using MySudo for the same purposes with it's built in browsers
Perplexity. It saves me a lot of time.
I changed to Metager https://metager.org/ … it’s the only one I’ve found that still respects yer "string search"
I was using Brave until last month. They did something and now image search redirects to Google/Bing so might as well use Google I guess...
Oh and also the normal search results got really bad all of a sudden.
Wow, glad I'm not the only one who had that impression. I have been using Brave Search for about half a year now and rarely had any problems finding what I was looking for, then eventually I started getting mostly older results, sometimes not even on topic.
Presearch. I run a node and get paid for running it. The searches are solid as well.
The search results are very similar to that of Google and I support a small-time project. Plus running the node I get a small portion of pre token when my node gets hits. I have no plans to really ever cash it out unless the project dies. Just find it fun to see the node getting hits and getting a few dollars here and there.
Startpage is great and uses g00g's search index. DuckDuckGo used to be my goto, but then they switched to using Microsoft Bing's search index.
I use DDG and im pretty happy with it. I now pretty much only use google if i need to find working hours and location of a store on google maps, as DDG doesnt have that information as obviously available
I use Ecosia. Supposedly I've done enough searches for 241 trees to be planted, and I've yet to see anything that suggests they dont follow through with the promise to fund the planting of trees (although I've not actively looked). I think it's backed by bing so the results are a bit iffy sometimes, but I use the equivalent of ddg bangs to search Google if I need
startpage
Big fan of Kagi, though Bing chat is unironically very good for most of my needs.
Google has been worse than Bing for most of the last two years, but Kagi was working better for me than either for the last year. Bing chat is a whole different animal, though.
I don't think you can have a search engine that indexes the entire internet without monetization some direction: either as a set of eyeballs for an advertisement engine masquerading as a web search index, or as a subscriber. So, don't be surprised they ask for money dollars! It's ok if the maths don't add up for you, though. For me, it's nice being able to pay for something I use and know that that is the explicit relationship we have. I get pissy when it's suggested as free but the cost is my attention, but maybe you don't work that way and that's ok too :D
I understand that it's a lot of work but I'm sorry, a starting plan of $5 per month is WAY to much. I'll just use searxng.
Sure, if that makes sense for you go for it. To me, 60$ a year is a single pizza delivery, so it seems foolish for me to worry too much about it when it's something I need consistent use of throughout the day, every day. I find a good search engine way more essential than a tv streaming service, so it really is a no brainer for me.
I can completely get behind paying for a service if that means the service works and is better than all the other ones. I'll at least try it out. Personally, I'd probably prefer if I could pay for a certain number of searches (like pay for a 1000 searches with 20 bucks) instead of the subscription model. I'm glad that there's an ad-free search service though.
They were working toward adding some billing flavors like that but it's unclear if it was like a prepaid cellphone or just a "for a sub you get X minutes a month" kinda deal (continuing the analogy). I'm grandfathered into the infinite searches that I've never used all that much of so I haven't really paid any serious attention to it, just kinda peripherally somewhat-aware :)
Try using: https://www.google.com/webhp?pws=0&gl=us&gws_rd=cr
What's this?
Kagi. It's a paid search engine, but this means it has more incentive to offer features that you, rather than advertisers, want
I used to use startpage, but I’ve recently switched to using random SearXNG instances with libredirect. It’s pretty good results wise and means I’m not dependant on just one entity providing my results.
Surprising no one has said Metager yet, very privacy focused search engine, no hassle.
DDG. On a related note, it seems like Google doesn't know me at all, 'cause they always give me wiki results in my local language over the english wiki, although I exclusively click the google search result for English Wikipedia further down...
I mainly use DDG, including bangs to search other sites, but I occasionally still use Google if I'm having trouble finding something.
I tried you.com for a long period of time. It has some nice ways to present content but overall I too often did not find what I was looking for so I switched back to startpage.com as unpersonalized version of Google.
I use MullvadVPN and recently started using Mullvads leta search service. It is basically a Front End for Googles Search APi. The result of an external audit was released recently.
The results arengood so far, but I'm not sure if I'll be using it long term.
I use a mix of DuckDuckGo, Bing and links through Bing Chat.
I use DDG on desktop and Google on mobile. Unfortunately Google still has some conveniences that I can't give up just yet.
I use my own instance of SearXNG, its private, and has good settings. It is a few milliseconds slow with some searches taking 1 second.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
I use DuckDuckGo and am happy with it
save