So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years.
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are, and how it’s trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
How long has Google been this bad?
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
If you’re using DDG for privacy, then indeed you are wrong.
It may be “less invasive” than google, but it’s neither anonymous, nor private.
Here’s a bunch more reasons from techrights.org, a site dedicated to digital freedom and exposing corruption.
Direct privacy abuse:
DDG was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.
DDG’s app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (reaction).
DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)
DDG is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers.
When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default browser.
DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium."
CloudFlare:
DDG promotes one of the largest privacy abusing tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity.
Full article: http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/
ETA: The bulk of the text in my reply was lifted from a reddit comment. I tried to format my comment to reflect that it’s a “quote”, alas I’ve failed. Hence this.
Also, I don’t have a card in this game. I understand anonymity and privacy - I dislike intentional deception.
What to use them, if not DDG
I’ve collected these 3 so far, but Swiss Cows if you go deep enough uses Bing. I’m not sure about Mojeek or Start Page.
I have good experience with brave search, after I moved away from the crap Qwant actually is
Qwant is that bad? I remember hearing decent things about it a few years ago but I never got around to trying it because it’s blocked in my country for some god forsaken reason.
That’s exactly one of the reasons why I find it shit. It’s not blocked in my country but as soon I need to go abroad, can’t use it anymore. There’s more reasons why it sucks and some of them are recent
That’s exactly one of the reasons why I find it shit. It’s not blocked in my country but as soon I need to go abroad, can’t use it anymore. There’s more reasons why it sucks and some of them are recent
Swisscows does use Bing, Startpage uses Bing and/or Google depending upon where you are, we are fully independent: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ is a visualisation that might be useful
So is Mojeek a standalone since it’s yellow? It looks like a lot of other people use them and not the other way around. Yep is cool, but I think they get their money from the sites that pay them? I looked at it yesterday, it’s sort of a strange set up that I’m not sure I understand.
yes we are indeed a standalone, the sizes of bubbles are reflections of the number of index-usage relationships yep is attached to ahrefs: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/yep-search-engine/ where I can speak to where results come from, I couldn’t tell you about their model
Mojeek gives good results, I’ll keep trying it. I’m not sure about yep though, how do the people get paid? I didn’t see any sign up. It sounds like it’s a platform for their SEO subscribers.
sorry for taking a while to get back but the main source of mojeek revenue is api sales, having people pay to access results for different applications (bing does similar i.e. duckduckgo, qwant, ecosia)
Mojeek isn’t perfect, but it’s truly independent search engine.
and when people let us know where we fall down we’re able to make it better, growing alongside the userbase!
I use kagi, it’s very good.
I can’t justify Kagi’s pricing but I liked it. I’d blow through the cheapest plan in a week. Neeva was pretty good too before they pivoted, also pricey imo though.
Do they “give high rankings” to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don’t go in and penalize them for… telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?
Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page’s query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.
The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.
The “accusation” of “fingerprinting” was along the lines of “their site called a canvas function oh no”. It’s not “fingerprinting” every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.
What exactly is “all data available in my session” when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it’s nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.
This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn’t that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it’s that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds “anonymous” to me, even if it isn’t Tor-strength anonymity that’s resistant to wiretaps.
There’s an important difference between “we’re trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don’t boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo”, as opposed to “we’re building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners”. And I feel like you shouldn’t take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.
Christ on a bicycle.
I just learnt of searx today, any bad news there?
I recently learned about it, but haven’t used it. From what I understand, it’s similar to how the fediverse works; individual instances are run by whoever wants to run them. If you run your own instance, you have complete trust in it, but you effectively aren’t anonymous (unless you support a whole bunch of users to pool together. If you join someone else’s instance, you have to trust them. There’s public and private instances.
The other downside is that, like many other small players, they are a metasearch engine, so they rely on the big players like Google and Bing who actually crawl the web for information to index. If Google or Bing want to hide information, that trickles down into metasearch engines, too. It’s somewhat buffered by thr fact that your metasearch can look through a whole bunch of different indexes, so you aren’t held to one countries censorship, but it probably still has an effect.
Excellent reply. Thank you. Do you have any suggestions for alternatives?
They also do ranked search like google, although not as bad but i think that is just a factor of age. Actual search term is often 5th or more down page
You need to put a > in front of each new line.
Honestly thats like the most annoying thing about lemmy. Or maybe its just sync. But still damn annoying.
Just check the web ui and it appears it’s part of Lemmy.
TESTING
TEST
Edit: Sync doesn’t seem to require one added to blank new lines but Lemmy does.
Excellent reply. Thank you. Do you have any suggestions for alternatives?
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Read for the exact timeline
That is an amazing read. Thank you!
I’ve found Google alternatives great for things that are… filtered (copyright etc), but honestly no matter what search engine I use, I swear none just give you the results for your query anymore. I’ve still been finding the Bing-based ones horrible quality for relevancy and defaulting to Google.
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are
Interesting, as the incredibly poor results are why I am still not using DDG. It’s like a worse Bing, and Bing is already terrible.
You are btw correct that Google results have gotten worse. There were studies run that confirmed this. The very same studies found that Bing (and by extension ~all third-party engines) have also gotten worse, and faster so than Google. In other words, search as a whole has gone to shit, which anecdotally matches up with my repeated attempts to swap to DDG every 6-12 months that just result in learning to add
!gto every single search, so I might as well skip doing that.Your take matches my experience perfectly. I always am baffled when people say Google is worse than ddg. I always wanted to use ddg instead, but try as I might, on a literal daily basis, at least 30% ddg results are trash and I have to switch to Google to find whatever I am looking for
I’m pretty sure it’s just trendy to call Google search shit, and to criticise the top product. I’m also pretty sure DDG is just uses Bing search under the hood (plus it’s privacy features), so I always thought these complaints were quite funny. The ads on Google are probably the most aggressive though, which IMO is the worst part.
It started when Search Engine Optimisation became a thing, so it’s been a while. But it really went downhill a few years ago.
Don’t think any engine is immune to SEO
Google has been this bad since their initial IPO, when they signalled their intent to do this, and should have been stopped to protect the most useful public utility ever invented. Since that day they’ve been a pimp; the decision to become a pimp led to this.
“Do no evil”
“Don O’Evil”
It’s been bad for a few years at least but it has gotten even worse recently, I assume due to incorporating AI/LLM’s into the mix.
It doesn’t help that the AI answer it gives takes up like half the screen and takes 30 seconds to load. LLMs are great for asking complex questions, but that’s not what I want to use a search engine for.
Hahaha, I ~just came after a search using g**gle due to ddgo being down, I noticed the “web” search is no longer the default (as it was discussed some days ago here).
Google seems to have a huge grip on people and they don’t seem to notice (or act against) the terrible services of google search…
They didn’t make that the default. What was discussed was a way to make it default (add https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 as a custom search engine)
And the comments on those posts said we should actually use DDG instead lol
Google started getting really bad about a year ago
^This is for anyone who doesn’t know, click on the web button in the “More” drop down list after making a search to get the old style search results instead of the new ones. People mentioned this in the thread earlier so I thought I’d make it clear.
I’ve been trying to get used to DDG recently and while I’ve definitely noticed the decline of Google, that decline has been subtle for me, it hasn’t become a disaster, it’s just generally frustrating and just not as good as it used to be. But that said, I haven’t exactly loved DDG in comparison. It’s okay, definitely works, recent outage excepted, but I often found the results kind of needed more work to make use of, they were more kind of, on the topic of what I asked for rather than specifically what I asked within the domain of that topic. It’s more like using a search engine as one would have done some 15 or so years ago. Often if trying to find something out I’d be disappointed by the non specific or irrelevant results and get suspicious and try changing back to google for the same thing and found that though they largely contained the same results, Google would have one or two that DDG didn’t which were closer to the top of the results and were more specifically about my precise query than just the general topic. I think these tend to be things like forum posts where, if my query is a question, someone’s asked basically that exact or very similar question.
I think DDG is mostly working ok enough for me that I’ll persevere but I can’t say it’s been better.
I found that switch DDG to my default was good enough for ~80% of my searches. I’ll only use Google as an alternative for shopping since that’s where DDG legitimately just sucks at providing anything that’s not “temu” or alibaba.
Feels like about 6 months or so? If I do an image search it only seems to pull items linking to a retail site. Everything is about sales and I can’t find information.
I think it’s been years now. At least a couple of years, I was baffled too back in the day.
It might be my localization, but it doesn’t seem that bad to me, and I generally use duckduckgo. But forced localization is enough.
A couple years ago I began getting frustrated. Last year I started to first go to Bing, google as failsafe. Now I gave up on everything so might as well go with Ecosia. When I NEED something, I’ll go with bing/bing’s chatGPT.
Can confirm. I struggled to remember the name of the ancient website vampirefreaks after the concept came up in conversation and out of the big search engines only Bing’s flavor of chatGPT could tell me what I was looking for.
