I have always liked and used Duck duck go more than google but now i am considering if i should switch because of the shit they pulled with their app and yesterday when i clicked a link it took me directly to their newsletter subsciption page not even like a popup a proper page without any way except manually backing out . So is there a better alternative or is DDG still the best ?

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
    0·
    6 months ago

    I just want to say that as frustrating as it is, it’s also fascinating to see search sort of crumbling to rise again with a new generation.

    When you see monopolies forming, it’s so easy to just assume that’s a one-way process. You can’t imagine how it could go the other way, other than by government crackdown or war or something.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      it’s also fascinating to see search sort of crumbling to rise again with a new generation

      That’s not fascinating to see, mostly because it just isn’t happening. Yes, search throughput on Google is dropping, but not because that traffic is going to smaller competitors. Some of it is going to Bing because most end users do not actively select a search:

      • Google Chrome is by-far the dominant browser, hence virtually all traffic goes to Google.
      • Microsoft Edge and the Windows start menu search are quite prevalent on Windows, hence a fair chunk of traffic goes to Bing.

      It’s important IMO to keep in mind we’re in a highly tech and anti-corporation echo chamber here, voluntarily. The information we consume might lead us to consume “search is crumbling”, but that attributes agency to people’s choice of search engine that just doesn’t exist. You use the search that is pre-installed, much like you use the browser that is pre-installed. Neither is a tool you want to choose, or even care that you can.

    • aard@kyu.de
      0·
      6 months ago

      I’ve been trying that for a while until I ran out of searches, and was trying to pay - after getting unsolvable captchas thrown at me several times by their payment processor I eventually gave up. Having a captcha at that point also doesn’t make any sense at all - as I’m in the EU my card will have to go through strong verification before adding it. For a US audience the experience might be different - I guess that’s also their main initial target.

      They also just did a bare minimum job of supporting non-javascript - while it nowadays is pretty much impossible to handle payment without allowing some javascript they also have their own account logic unusable without javascript, and they don’t have a way to easily open that in a private session when you get stuck. That’d be trivially solvable by just giving you a URL with an account key attached you can paste into a private instance to do your payment.

      metager does that way better - they’re usable without javascript, and don’t force you to create an account with them. You can create a key with tokens tied to it to unlock search features. You can just use that to enable it in other browsers - and you easily jump into a private instance from the key workflow to just add money to the key.

      I might revisit kagi later to see if they fixed some of those problems - but for now metager seems to be the best option. I’m a bit amazed they still exist - it was my main search engine back in the 90s before google came around.

      • RalphWolf@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        Are you certain that you’re human? If I couldn’t solve captchas I’d be concerned.

  • Matty Roses@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    I switched to Brave when DDG started censoring results. I lay to be excluded from ads, which is an option I appreciate.

  • Curious Canid@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Startpage is a good choice. I am currently experimenting with searXNG. It seems a little messier to use, but I’m getting more relevant results and less junk.

    • Cheradenine@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      With SearX go into the options and enable/ disable what you want to see results from. There is a lot of fine tuning you can do.

      • Curious Canid@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        That is a concern, but they seem to have taken precautions to prevent that from being exploited, at least in the short term. We’ll have to see how it works out. I haven’t given up on them yet.

  • Octospider@lemmy.oneEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    What “shit” did they “pull with their app”?

    All I gathered from your post is that you want to ditch DDG because of a newsletter issue. Please explain your privacy and security concerns.

    • DAEMON@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      6 months ago

      They allowed some company to track users (I don’t remember which one but if i had to guess micrososft) it was a big thing at that time and they came out and said it was only for the people who used their mobile app and not the search engine . But come on they had to wait till someone caught them to come out ? That breaks some trust like how do we know right now they aren’t pulling some shit and will come out with an explanation tommorow when someone catches them.

  • Lauch@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    The ones I always hear about:

    But to be fair I don’t really trust any search engine. I’m currently working on a simple webpage that serves as my “search engine” by randomly redirecting each search to one of the above ones.

  • BiggestBulb@kbin.run
    0·
    6 months ago

    I’ve been using searxng.site. It’s a deployed SearXNG instance. So far, it works good enough for my use cases. Unless I’m looking up something VERY niche, I get quick results (the images tab is a little slow, but not even close to unbearable).

    I would have rolled with Ecosia, but as you can see from my previous post on my profile, I was frustrated that there was no option to filter by “past year”.

    • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      6 months ago

      Don’t have the link for it now but there are several SearXNG random redirectors so you don’r have to lock yourself in with one particular provider of the search engine.