I want a search engine that returns results solely on the terms of the query. I'm so tired of search engines thinking they know what I want to see based on my history. Not only do I question the validity of the results when they are so subject to change, I also worry I'm missing something.

"Hey, Google, what can I use to replace white bean paste?" "Hoisin sauce is a great replacement for white bean sauce!"

"Hey, Google, things have gone weird in macOS 12, how fix?" "MACOS 4 was RELEASEd in 1912 AWKWARDLy with A spanner"

I get that search is a hard problem but they are spectacularly bad at it for being the best.

DuckDuckGo is pretty good, is all about privacy and they don't have way less ressources as Apple. But we saw how the launch of Apple Maps was not perfect, so maybe it's easier and better for them to accept the $15B.

DuckDuckGo is literally Bing with some privacy features.

>DuckDuckGo is literally Bing

How so?

In that DuckDuckGo gives your search terms to Bing (I think they also had a deal with Yandex for russian queries, not sure if that's current) and receives the search results back and displays them. (adding its own quick results and ads)

I think that's simplifying it greatly. Here's their help page:

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

They have their own crawler as well, and there are a bunch of other sources depending on what you're searching for. Bing results are probably a larger part of it at the end of the day, but it's not quite as you are alluding to.

That page is intentionally misleading. They list crawled websites as 'sources'.

If DuckDuckGo claims to have over hundreds sources, then Bing and Google have over billions of sources by the same definition.

To me that page always reads as if it tries to play up their own contribution, which until there is more detail makes me suspicious if the main results are meaningfully influenced by them, or if it's "just" infoboxes etc.

Maybe, but I also think basically saying "well, it just spits out Bing results" is over simplifying. There's probably somewhere in the middle, as I said, I suspect Bing results are a pretty large chunk of it but I also try not to just hyperbolically state things ya know?

I don't believe "it's bing results with added extras around them" is hyperbolical, given how similar DDG and Bing results look everytime I try it. If it's wrong, DDG would IMHO do themselves a favor by sharing more details here.

Surely someone out there has a paper on comparative search engine results.

Oh, I see. Thanks.

I tried to switch to using DuckDuckGo and found it basically unusable. Essentially the same quality as Bing. Maybe slightly better, but not by much.

That's because DuckDuckGo is essentially a reskin of Bing search. They don't do their own indexing save for a few token websites.