My default browsing habits are in incognito mode. I only open normal browser for websites where I want a persistent session. I haven't noticed the "bubblification" with DDG. And I actually find DDG AI answers helpful (sometimes).
Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
81–90 of 96 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#82https://search.brave.com/ Feels like Google Search from 2008.
At present, it works from commend line although a little slow
No CAPTCHA, no User-Agent header required but need SNI
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
For about the last to years I've seen the bubble effect creeping in. And, sorry no offence to you personally, to be blunt, I'm not interested in damage control. When I make a generic search unrelated to a hobby I have and I get as top answer something about my hobby, it's a very red and very flashing red flag of bubble effect. The nail in the coffin has happened this weekend when some un-asked for auto-correct preven…
On the first point about bubble effect, DuckDuckGo never uses past searches to generate search results, that hasn’t changed and will not change. Is that something you’re seeing on the search results page or maybe in your browser?
What does it use?
A reason I switched was to stop localisation of searches, and the dropdown at the top of the page used to be great for that but now doesn’t seem to do much.
For example if I search “pergola” then I get local pergola providers: good. But if I check the box next to my country flag (I.e. to turn localisation off) I _still_ get local pergola providers. Even if I change the region to another country I still get local results (though further down the page).
My country isn’t well known for pergolas as far as I know, and the effect looks bigger than the search reacting to language differences. So why do I still get local results?
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the first point about bubble effect, DuckDuckGo never uses past searches to generate search results, that hasn’t changed and will not change. Is that something you’re seeing on the search results page or maybe in your browser?
What does it use? A reason I switched was to stop localisation of searches, and the dropdown at the top of the page used to be great for that but now doesn’t seem to do much. For example if I search “pergola” then I get local pergola providers: good. But if I check the box next to my country flag (I.e. to turn localisation off) I _still_ get local pergola providers. Even if I change the region to another country I st…
You still get local results because that toggle is just one of the signals we use to get search results. Turning it off basically just says “don’t send this country as a signal."
If you selected a different country from the dropdown next to that toggle, instead of switching that toggle off, I would expect that to return results from the selected country instead of showing local results.
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#85Here are some "web search engines" that still work for me without CAPTCHA, Javascript or cookies
Most do not User-Agent (UA) header; some require SNI
https://api.mwmbl.org/?q=example
https://wiby.me/?q=example&p=1
https://monocles.eu/search {post-data q=example&pageno=1}
https://crowdview-next-js.onrender.com/api/search-v3?query=e...
Need SNI
https://www.bing.com/search?q=example&cc=US&first=1
Need SNI
https://www.webcrawler.com/serp?q=what&page=1
Need SNI, UA
NB. I (a) do searching from command line
(b) use UNIX filters I wrote that take SERPs/JSON as input and output SQL/simple HTML
(c) read HTML with a text-only browser that has no Javascript engine
(d) have no familiarity with Javascript-enabled, "AI"-enabled browser experience other than reading comments about it
(e) have other search strategies for finding information, do not rely on "web search engines"
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
For about the last to years I've seen the bubble effect creeping in. And, sorry no offence to you personally, to be blunt, I'm not interested in damage control. When I make a generic search unrelated to a hobby I have and I get as top answer something about my hobby, it's a very red and very flashing red flag of bubble effect. The nail in the coffin has happened this weekend when some un-asked for auto-correct preven…
Sorry for the bluntness, but the truth is you're being a giant asshole to someone that stepped in to learn more about your situation from your perspective to see how the company they work for lost you as a customer. They could have been there for one day or a decade, and may or may not have anything to do with the place the product is at. You expect some of this from a company perspective, as unhappy users are normal…
Your not caught up on how our culture is changing.
This is the new normal.
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#87I gladly pay for Kagi because the experience is so much better that it’s worth it to me.
I'll expand on a few reasons why I personally love Kagi: - Ability to block/lower/raise/pin domains. Some examples of commonly tuned domains are here https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights - Shared custom bangs across my sessions. I can add work-specific bangs (e.g. !bug -> Jira search) and have them available across my devices. - Regexp redirects, to automatically redirect online documentation results of some librarie…
> Shared custom bangs across my sessions. I can add work-specific bangs (e.g. !bug -> Jira search) and have them available across my devices.
I’ve been on Kagi for 2 years and just learned about this. I really, really need to sit down and RTFM.
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like they only give you 100 on a trial account
Sorry, let me be more obvious. I am not pointing to a solution, but a pointer to the solution. Showing what is possible. The solution is pulling/parsing the CT logs yourself.
If you’re talking about SSL cert logs, that excludes a ton of web content.
And you haven’t shown me that you can even get all those for free anyway
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does it use? A reason I switched was to stop localisation of searches, and the dropdown at the top of the page used to be great for that but now doesn’t seem to do much. For example if I search “pergola” then I get local pergola providers: good. But if I check the box next to my country flag (I.e. to turn localisation off) I _still_ get local pergola providers. Even if I change the region to another country I st…
You still get local results because that toggle is just one of the signals we use to get search results. Turning it off basically just says “don’t send this country as a signal." If you selected a different country from the dropdown next to that toggle, instead of switching that toggle off, I would expect that to return results from the selected country instead of showing local results.
I would also expect that but that is not what I see. There are the ads at the top of the page which I do expect to be localised, but further down the page I get local results for my (quite small) country which I would not expect to get if I was in the country that I’ve selected as the search country.
Is there a way that I could use ddg that would return the same result for me as someone else would get? Not someone specific, but a an unbiased result so that I can know that if someone else searched with the same (lack of) parameters they will get the same results?
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#90I have roughly the same path as you through default search engines over the years and recently left duckduckgo for ecosia. It's the best alternative I've found and after about a week or two it became second nature just like the ones that came before it. If I don't find what I'm looking for I may still jump over to Google (via incognito window) p.s ecosia does have their annoying obligatory ai chat bot that attempts t…
i also use ecosia. actually, ddg, startpage, kagi, or self-hosted search engines are just anonymous queries to google and bing. brave has its own index, but i don't have a very positive impression of the brave browser. so if everything will eventually return to google and bing anyway, why not look at it from a different perspective and use it for reforestation. ecosia's policy is still to send ip addresses to partners like google and bing, but that's just the IP address, not the user profile. google might know where the query is coming from, but it doesn't know who i am. i don't see much point in that. anyway, i'm not doing anything shady; I just don't like feeling like I'm being exploited. but if i know i'm helping the community in some way or doing something meaningful just by querying through ecosia, then i'll accept revealing my ip address to them. oh, and ecosia is partnering with qwant to create its own index, and I will continue to support them