In the last couple of months I have noticed an increasing trend of supplying me search results that are completely unrelated to the current query and tie back to my location or previous searches. I can say this with a high degree of certainty this is without a doubt beyond the 100th instance this has happened.
My browser is configured against tracking and fingerprinting (in fact all my devices are) which would make it fairly difficult to retain any data unless they are profiling me.
You must log in or # to comment.
Odd. I wonder what is going on here because when I search that exact same query I get accurate results.
I’ve had iffy search results before but never anything that bad.
I also returned totally accurate results using the exact same query. I would really like to know what is going on here. This is a common complaint with some people using DDG, that the results are poor, but I consistently have as good if not better results than using Google.
great. i finally get off google and now duckduckgo is bad. i hate the internet.
Kagi was my favorite but their pricing model is a little too high still. If it was $5 for 500 searches I would do that but the unlimited for $10 is just a bit too high for me.
It has been doing this shit for a while. Returning results based on just one key word out of many keywords from my query.
Lately they have been even ignoring the restrictive +“keyword” syntax and returning whatever shit just so they won’t admit their (or Microsoft’s indexer) is shit
It’s not the fact that there are filler results that bothers me, after all there might not be results for everything we may possibly search.
It’s the fact that these are links to services which have a tie to my unique identifiers which I deliberately declined access to in all available ways!
Try kagi.com
I you have to pay for it, but t’s amazing
I’ll take the trial sometime and see if I should drop the cents
Thanks for mentioning Kagi! I’ve been looking for some Google/DDG replacement but every single one I’ve tried had some sort of dealbreaking drawback for me. Google collects all my data and heavily filters my results, DDG provides dogshit results most of the time I don’t even bother using it, Startpage is awfully slow, and I didn’t even get to understand what Searx is as looking for it led me to some random ugly pages.
Subbed for 1 year 10 bucks plan. Works super-fast on mobile too. Hell yeah!
What would we suggest as a realistic alternative? Sears? Startpage? Brave? (I am no expert by the way, just looking for tips)
I just switched to using Kagi recently and I like it a lot so far! Theres a free tier for 100/searches a month you can use to figure out if you like it.
Searx sucks for images in my experience, startpage was bought by an advertising company, brave is weird for a multitude of reasons but I don’t know how good their search engine is as I’ve never tried it
However I do think that finding a searx instance that works for you and then using another engine like ddg for images is the way to go… You could add a shortcut like “.ddg garbage truck” for easily searching with for example ddg on firefox
How does searx suck for images exactly? 🫠
I get the same shit at work where I can’t use a VPN: like 7-8 relevant results then basically just ads for local businesses after that.
I have still the same good results in ddg, no matter what device or browser. I have noticed that they have some location bias when ddg (and any other search engine i have tried) has non good results globaly but good resulta locally.
Still better then anything i have tested. Just because there are minor anomalies i will stick with them.
deleted
I have searx, and i’m feeling like a god of search, better than google, better that bingbinggo, and anything else Although I had a lot of problems with it when I was hosting it on a RPI and docker, now i’m not, and it’s just so much better
I turned JS off other than for specific websites. This includes DDG. It gives me accurate results, although the other commenters don’t seem be facing your problem either
I paid for Kagi and have been super happy with it. If you don’t mind paying, I highly recommend it. Not having ads or manipulated results is worth it for me.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
It might be blindly searching for websites that contain any of the words scan, mark 2, pro.
It seems to do that when it can’t find a page with all of the words, and the only way I know to fix it is put the whole thing in quotation marks.
Same here. Every time I ditch Google and go to ddg, I just laugh how irrelevant all the results are and I continue feeding Google with personal data and telemetry and whatnot.
It is true that even Google’s results feel much worse than before but it’s still significantly better than ddg.
Not for me – if DDG is trash, Google is actually unusable.
Me neither. Even Bing is better than google nowadays.
Also, when it comes to piracy, google basically blocks every relevant result.
