19 hours
EDIIT :
Apparently, there is an issue with the warning request to disable the ad blocker
I use Fennec F-Droid and Cromite, and I don’t see this issue.
to get around the adblocker warning, use this link.
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- commander@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
I’ve defaulted to ddg for like 2 years now. Solid. Good enough. Really what happened is that SEO optomization websites even before the AI craze made Google search so awful that ddg became just as good if not better for me than google
1 hourI use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and have for a while. But I have noticed lately that every time I search for something, it almost always only returns product pages. I don’t know if this is effective SEO or a way of DDG monetizing their search. But unfortunately I’ve been looking for alternatives just because it’s so frustrating when searching for information to get nothing back but a bunch of sites trying to sell you their product.
- DiaDeLosMuertos@aussie.zoneEnglish12 minutes
I’ve been quite happy to use the AI stuff actually. I’ve asked lots of random questions and within seconds it comes up with answers. Jesus should we go back to having to type in the specific web address to find everything !?
http/:www.whatdhfuckamitypingallthisoutfor?
Each to their own. Go in peace.
- pogmommy@lemmy.mlEnglish2 minutes
You probably don’t remember since you’ve been eating glue at an LLM’s advice, but search engines have existed for a while, and even worked at one point!
DDG isn’t the holy grail people make it out to be; it has contracts with Microsoft and we all know how Microslop likes AI.
No, they’re not, but they are one of the better-known alternatives to Google, and they do advocate privacy. This, in itself, is a good thing and should be promoted.
The problem is that Google’s monopoly on web search is so large that using Google is the de facto standard for the vast majority of people. Getting them to acknowledge that there are alternatives to Google benefits privacy on the internet more than DDG having contracts with MS harms it.
- brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
For what it’s worth, DDG recognized this immediately.
They dipped their toe in AI search, felt the pushback, and went all-in on putting toggles and immediately accessible opt-outs everywhere. They put a filter for AI images (and I hope they do the same for AI SEO spam).
In other words, they actually leaned in and listened to their own users. Unlike the soulless vampire on a throne Google has become.
- WhoIsTheDrizzle@lemmy.worldEnglish13 minutes
While I do appreciate this, their search results aren’t great. I hate to say this, but even with horrible AI forward results, Google still returns better and more relevant results. I’ll still use ddg first but it generally leaves me wanting.
- 1 minute
Usually if I search anything seriously, like for work, I use journals that require a subscription that I access through my institution. If I’m trying to find a funny meme, that’s different. Google is fine for the casual stuff, but since I just don’t like them DuckDuckGo seems like an acceptable alternative even though I’ve found it slightly less effective.
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish2 hours
While their first party browser convinced me if it’s privacy capabilities, I need extensions (yes, recognizing that makes me much more fingerprintable) so I use their browser less than 1% of the time.
However, I have subscribed for their premium Services because I already trust their anti-tracker on my mobile devices and they have sufficient number of VPN nodes to be useful to me (I do miss Mullvad, and probably will use them when I’m traveling International, but it is getting harder to find good nodes and they don’t have servers in south Korea at all, either).
And their measures to make a neutered and neutral AI interface is the first time I’ve ever paid for general AI access, finding it’s helped some of my efforts as AI has been a necessary component for building my home studio and mini rack. I’m scared that my brain has already been ruined, acclimating to Google’s integration of Bard and then later Gemini, and I make a regular exercise of hunting for sites that have articles or discussions that will help me work through tech projects and puzzles “the hard way” with just vanilla search queries and amendments.
I love that DDG’s tech stack seems to play well in the general broader ecosystem, so it’s my search engine of choice for all of my Gecko/Fusion browsers (Fennec, WaterFox, LibreWolf, and occasionally, full-fat vanilla Firefox).
I had really thought I could grow into using Kagi but I couldn’t make it make sense for myself. When you’re limiting paid subscribers at the first tier to 300 general web queries a month, and i could consume that many just on correcting my own typos and re-searches alone, DDG was a better investment for me for the time being.
TL;DR - I love that these guys play well with others, so I’ll even pay for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.
- brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
+1 for Kagi’s base tier limit. It’s just not close to enough.
- betanumerus@lemmy.caEnglish3 hours
Until real Americans take their country back from the corrupt pedophile protecting “administration”, I’ll mostly avoid US search engines altogether.
Those who enable and finance the pedophiles are international… they won’t disappear when Trump dies, they have old money and are multigenerational. Trump is just a stooge for international interests, like Epstein was.
See Deutsch Bank, for example… they financed Trump with billions of dollars, and broke the law to do so. Without them, Trump would not be President today.
Also, look at the funders of organizations like The Heritage Foundation; coincidentally, many members are shared between them and the Council on Foreign Relations. All of this will remain when Trump is gone.
- betanumerus@lemmy.caEnglish1 hour
They’re also looking forward to a less corrupt, more trustworthy administration. Greater reliability leads to more investments. You know that.
- MilitantAtheist@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
I can’t find anything I’m looking for on Google anymore. It’s not a search engine, it’s just ads.
- 6 hours
My friend just told me ddg is now better than google search
- buddascrayon@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
The thing that is hilarious about this is that DDG is powered by Bing. 😂
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish3 hours
The thing about THAT is Bing built their house literally copying Google’s homework. In the early days (maybe 2013? Long before they went masks-off) google published examples of them inventing new unique words that didn’t organizational exist in open web pages, and those popping up and Bing search indexes 3 weeks later.
Kagi, at least according to a few talks Doctorow of the EFF gave in recent history, admit their indices just came from Google’s as well.
Watching everyone’s favorite advertising agency turn heal so swiftly has been one of the biggest bummers of my adult life.
Now? It’s been better than Google for a while. Google’s results have been bad for a long time.
I haven’t used Google for about three years now, other than to compare it to DDG results now and then.
They are not the same, in spite of the claims of others on Lemmy.
DDG does have an AI assistant that you can turn off (allegedly). This is on Firefox browser, Windows OS.
- kalpol@lemmy.caEnglish7 hours
Its not crazy hard to install your own searxng instance. Works pretty well. The problem is that the Internet itself is turning into AI slop.
- trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtfEnglish5 hours
Check out yacy, its not well polished but at least it doesn’t rely on major search engines afaik (p2p)
The problem with your own searxng instance is that your searches across other engines come from your IP address.
So if you’re searching for something, everyone knows it’s you using IP triangulation. Google then tracks you around the internet.
If that doesnt bother you, OK great.
- agent_nycto@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
Dude I don’t even know what that is or what it does and I’m pretty sure most people don’t either. It might be easy but what the heck even is it?
- vodka@feddit.orgEnglish6 hours
It let’s you have one search website where you have it pull results from all other search engines (that you want) and then it can rank results based on where things rank on the various engines.
Tl;dr self hosted search proxy, with some advanced features
- Rekorse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish7 hours
Last time I tried I had issues but it was quite a while ago. Do you know a good guide or something you can post?
- kalpol@lemmy.caEnglish5 hours
I hate to say it, but I just had Claude generate the guide. The docker container is the easiest way I think.
- elucubra@sopuli.xyzEnglish5 hours
I have it installed in a docker container in Linux both as a search 3ngine for my local AI setup, and for regular browsing.
Setup and installation is a great use case for AI.
Go to Google gemini, and ask it to create a step by step guide to install a container with searxng, and how to allow searches from your browser(s). Make sure you tell gemini that you are a simple user, not a power user, so it shouldn’t assume anything. Also ask it to make sure it shows you how to make the container autostart with the pc. Tell gemini that you want this in a step by step tutorial.
Should make it easy, as you can ask questions if you get stuck, or something doesn’t work.
yep, me too. you can put “-ai” at the end of your search to shut off the slop, but it’s a PITA. Often I’ll just go to DDG.
There’s a DDG privacy first browser on Android. This is probably what they are referring to.
We’ve come full-circle. I used to download .html pages so I could browse them while offline. Now websites install themselves so they can browse you while offline.
- ILikeBoobies@lemmy.caEnglish5 hours
I thought it meant changing your default search engine.
I never considered that it was an app.
- Coriza@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
I “love” when the wrong technology is applied.
On the the dawn of the smartphones Mozilla tried to enter the space with an FirefoxOS and the pitch was that every app was just a website just more tightly integrated with the phone. The problem is that all the web stack is wonderfully resource hog and at the time phones were super underpowered running websites were not optimized in a browser that were not as optimized as today. So it was a terrible choice for the time being.
Other good one was Android early days. They choose Java as the default app environment and development. It kinda makes sense to use it if you want the same program to run on different platforms, the problem, again, it runs worst and with the underpowered devices of the time everything was a slog. And they doubled down on the mistake by using a garbage collector that doubled the memory usage of every app. The cherry on top, at least in hindsight is that arm was and still is the de facto Android plataform, greatly disminishing the advantage of using Java/JVM. And today Google enabled apps with native code optimized for specific plataforms, but everyone only care about ARM so of you try to run Android like in an Intel laptop a lot of apps are not compatible.
End of rant.
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish3 hours
Hey dude, just wanted to say that I learned a little bit from you today. Thanks for sharing on here.
I remember Apple famously disallowing any kind of “Write Once, Run Anywhere” platform tech at the dawn of iOS, ATVos and iPad OS, quite openly trying to fuck with Adobe’s and Sun’s shit.
But using apps to avoid needing all of the traffic and rendering capabilities for modern websites was key in its early days and I remember even 10 years ago recommending to clients and customers that were stuck with awful internet connections or underpowered devices, to try using the apps instead of the websites for things.
Nowadays, I only want to visit so many corpo resources strictly through a browser and fighting tooth and nail to avoid ever letting their apps on my phones. I would literally fire a bank for not having a functional Web page to do what I need done , especially since I probably can’t be on vanilla android for much longer the way things are going and too many secure apps require Google Play services for their circle of trust.
- RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
Too many people are brain hostages to the idea that apps do everything and you need an app for everything, even though most of the things are just websites. But all the apps are really doing is spying while they deliver their version of the website.
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish3 hours
I bought a literal thermometer, not a thermostat just a thermometer, which I wanted to log temperatures, and it insisted on me downloading an app and then setting up a free account. Noped out of that s*** and left caustic reviews but it was impossible to use without a smart device, without internet access, and without the invasion of privacy.
Just repeat that story a hundred times and you’re describing modern domestic life.
