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Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

#21

Post by dfxm12 »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #13

I love Google's and duck duck go AI suggestions. Am I crazy? I feel like 90% of the time they answer my question right there. It will definitively be a problem in the long term for monetization of the authors. But for me as a user, it's the best.

For me, most of the time they don't and instead tell me something I already know or make some assertion with no attribution. Pre-AI, I usually found my answer among the first few results anyway, most often the first. I find searching hard in general in a post AI world since almost all of the first few pages of results are either AI blog spam or links to shopping websites. The signal to noise ratio has just gotten untenably poor.

Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

#22

Post by traceroute66 »

Ecosia and Qwant have just started collaborating on EUSP (European Search Perspective)[1]

This could easily yield very interesting (i.e. "not just another bing proxy") results once it starts gaining traction.

I use DuckDuckGo at the moment, only because Startpage started making themselves impossible to use when they started aggressively blocking access via VPNs. As other people have already said,see `noai.duckduckgo.com` and `lite.duckduckgo.com` which might address your specific concerns.

If you are a Mullvad user, there is also Mullvad Leta[2], which has been security audited[3].

I might shift more towards Ecosia/Qwant.

[1] https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp-germany-rollout/ [2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/introducing-mullvad-leta-a-searc... [3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/16/security-audit-of-our-...

Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

#23

Post by teroshan »

kstrauser wrote: post #6

I 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 libraries to the specific out-of-date library we use in a legacy project.

All of these are not as important as knowing there is no incentive for the search engine to enshittify the results to bump some sponsored product in the results, to raise ad-heavy websites to the front to get back some precious ad revenue due to a conflict of interests, and to lower the quality of results in the hopes of making me search a second time so I am served a second batch of sponsored links.

Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

#24

Post by benj111 »

cyanregiment wrote: post #3

We need it - I’d use 3 search engines. It’s not like MMOs or social media where 1 winner takes all. I think people want more search options, cloud, email, and so-on. I once tried to index the web with local Mistral 7b. Here’s what I did: 1. Copy/pasted an English dictionary and removed the definitions, so I just had an Array of about 500k words. 2. Wrote a simple loop to iterate over the words, with the instruction t…

Wouldn't you do better say indexing Wikipedia, then what it links directly, then what those link directly?

As you note, you got into an adult content 'bubble'. Going to random sites doesn't mean that site is good in anyway. Wikipedia, or some other proxy for quality at least gives you a good baseline.

If you're aiming to index all of the web, you should have the same endpoint, but in the meantime my way, you are indexing 'good' sites

Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

#26

Post by ldng »

sakarrakas wrote: post #10
philipov wrote: post #5

What is bubblification?

I think it's when the search engine starts answering with links "tailored" by your usage, effectively trapping you into a bubble. But I also never heard the "bubbling" verb.

Exactly. I don't like search engine second-guessing what I'm looking for, more often than not it's a miss.

Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

#27

Post by Finnucane »

cachius wrote: post #25
slig wrote: post #16

https://search.brave.com/ Feels like Google Search from 2008.

The name collision with the browser is a bit unfortunate. If you set it to default search engine in Chrome on mobile, 'Search with Brave' is very ambiguous!

It's the same company isn't it? So they share the unfortunateness.

Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

#29

Post by SyneRyder »

If you don't mind paying and someone else having control over your search experience, Kagi is an option. Urkey (sp?) is another new alternative.

If you just want a free search engine, Brave is probably the best index. Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface.

But if you want to go down the rabbit hole, it's easy to build your own metasearch engine and search several engines at once - an AI model can make one for you in a single night with just a small PHP script, if you have your own website / webost. In my case, the combination of Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia covers all my search needs.

Deeper down the rabbit hole, you can build your own search index with SQLite, as an additional index for your metasearch. There are projects like Hister that will help make your own search index:

https://hister.org/

Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

#30

Post by axegon_ »

Annoyingly search was at large solved just a few years ago and sadly someone has to reinvent the wheel soon. Lately I've completely switched to ecosia. It gives really decent results for the time being, hoping it'd improve with their co-op with qwant. I also run searxng behind a tor proxy and while it does a pretty solid job overall, it still relies entirely on other search engines so it's not a question of "if" but "when" will it degrade massively.

As for Kagi - they've earned a life-long ban from me for political reasons.

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