Any recommendation? I use ddg but it's Bing based and the results are no better.

My experience with ddg has been very positive over the years. Although I think my eyes have gotten good at skipping over the noise in the search results. It might be nice to offload that effort to software.

DDG has no idea of the intent of your search based on your previous searches and unfortunately this generates abysmal results for me when searching for something like `ruby xxx`. Those terms rarely return results about the programming language. I unfortunately end up using Google in these situations, always to immediate success.

One of the biggest reasons to switch away from Google is to shed that "previous search" bias, and refine + refilter results till you hone in on what you want.

Leaving it to "the algorithm" to decide what to show you based on what it "thinks you want" from previous interactions turns the tool into no better than Twitter or Facebook optimizing engagement by showing you what they think you should see.

It's safe to say that most people searching for 'ruby <term>' have absolutely no idea what the ruby programming language is, and didn't mean to find results for it. If you're running a non-personalized search engine like ddg, which results do you show?

For reference, Ruby is only has 6% on the Stack overflow dev survey https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-...

I really like that it doesn't "know" me. I've come to appreciate starting from a well-known shared state, often quite empty, and then ranging out from there in my own unique way. I don't want my view of the world to change; I want my behavior to change, which ultimately yields a view of the world that is under my indirect control.

>ruby xxx

Not sure if the X's were to denote wildcards or if you're after porn actresses named Ruby, but either way it might be worth adding a term to the query to clarify

That's literally the conversation though. Google has enough context to know that you want programming language results, not porn or gemstones.

Oof - muscle memory failure....

I'll take having to write verbose and specific searches over google guessing what I really want any day.

Google seems to have changed to using NLP + "what would the average person potentially mean by this", meaning anything actually specific is nearly impossible to find. I'll have half my search terms completely ignored

Pretty sure you’re using “xxx” as “some generic search term” but if you include literal xxx as a search term, you’re almost definitely going to get some skewed search results.

xxx ** ??? same thing, it's obvious by context

As I indicated in my comment, I was “pretty sure” from context, but fowkswe enclosed their whole search term in backticks. I’m not familiar enough with ruby to know if there’s some valid package called “xxx.” Based on fowkswes response to another comment, it’s clear they meant “some variable search term” and not literal “xxx.” Out of curiosity, I tried a few $language xxx searches on Google & DDG. I get mostly porn results for Rust, Ruby, Julia, Bash, Java in both engines with xxx appended. Interestingly, on Google, Python xxx returns mostly programming results.

I've been using Kagi over the last few days and have actually been pleasantly surprised with it performing better than both Google and DDG for my use cases. It's still free during the beta so might be worth giving it a shot.

I’ve also been using https://kagi.com for the past couple of days and have found the search results to be unparalleled to both Google and DuckDuckGo. I haven’t come across any SEO spam and the results seem to be of better quality overall. They have all of the same bangs DDG uses and get results from Bing, Google, and a bespoke index. Because they query Bing and Google, it will be pretty expensive when it launches (it's in private beta) since it costs $12 per 1000 queries, but since search is so important, it will probably be worth it. They say they're privacy focused too, but it's hard to be sure when a product isn't open source.

Kagi isn't trying to take significant market share from Google or DDG, but find a niche (probably Hacker News type people). The one thing I find they're lacking is maps and location based results (e.g. you can't search for "lunch near me"). If you're interested, I'd recommend checking out their FAQ: https://kagi.com/faq

Hmm, annoyingly some bloody invite based thing instead of just being able to try the damn thing. What is this, 2004?

Just tried and it seems we have an underdog here that could be useful to avoid spammy results. I can totally see why they want this to be invite only, as they probably need to find out how to scale well. If it would go viral suddenly, they might not collapse and the whole effect would backfire.

Edit: This is really promising and interesting. They show a summary of the link when you hover over the crystal ball icon next to it, together with a button for "Block" and "Boost" - i.e. you can vote with your account. These metrics could be used for ranking and kill affiliate marketers.

I'm on the waitlist. AIUI they intend this to be a paid service eventually, which is highly desirable to me. If it can be made to work, I would very much like a search service that is directly paid for by its users, rather than funded via side channels such as advertising or paid results placement that create skewed incentives.

If they're not ready to charge for use yet, a limited preview makes more sense than a public free service.

Signed up; I will gladly pay for better results. Google has sold its soul long ago to the capitalism gods. DDG and Brave are no better.

They also have a browser that’s still in beta. Here’s the direct link to test flight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/DeC8ZDnu (got this after a month on the waitlist)

Can you be very kind to provide the Mac browser link as well? It seems this link is only valid for ios and iPadOS apps

Apparently their invite, once you receive it, is free to share with anyone. Enjoy:

https://kagi.com/signup?invite_code=adfreesearchengine

Might be a limit on the number of users - this link now gets an "expired" message after attempting to signup. Anybody else have one I can try?

It is in closed, invite-only beta.

Signed up for the beta, but their signup page has one annoyance... clicking back doesn't take you back one page in the signup process, it ejects you to the top but your answers are saved. Fine if it's an honest mistake, weird if it's an aesthetic choice, not a good idea if it's an indicator of how they plan to be different. It would be much better to prove how smart they are by fixing google's search than "fixing" well-established UI patterns.

How long did you have to wait for the invite?

2 days in my case

Thanks for sharing this link! I described my odyssey to finding craft printers in this thread [0], and just repeated the search on kagi.com. The results are better IMHO, even though the first hit is a link to some kind of Mindcraft-clone game that allows to craft printers. The second link directs at least to Canon's Craft Landingpage, and there are way less Spamsites and more Manufacturers links within the first 20 results. Those sites that are Spam, are at least a bit more disguised/offer more content than usual so I will let kagi get away with that.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136

Worth mentioning, that they actually have the blacklist feature for domains that google removed years ago.

I have been using Brave Search for the last half year, results seem to be better than DDG and you can append g! to your searches like DDG for Google results.

You.com has actually been really good for me.

After trying a few, I currently test Brave Search. It misses DDG's bangs, but results seem to be better.

DuckDuckGo is not Bing based.

It does in fact use the Bing backend for the majority of its web searches:

> DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

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

Of their additional sources they receive the commonly from Bing, but that is only from their additional sources. They use the results from there sure but by no means are they "Bing based".

Their intention is to confuse you, so they're successful on that front.

Their "hundreds of sources" are for very niche topics and appear in separate boxes. The 10 links per page come from Bing which would make them Bing-based.

I don't like Brave Browser at all with its integrated crypto ads, but I've been using Brave Search for a couple of days and it seems nice, much better than DDG:

https://search.brave.com

I use ecosia.org wich is like ddg, but a part of the proceeds go into charity. Not affiliated with them, just like it a lot.

Like ddg it's just Bing with a gimmick, but it's decent.

> ddg it's just Bing with a gimmick

Is that true? I've read images are served by Bing, not sure about the web search.

DDG is like "Dr Pepper" of search engines.

Coke/Pepsi create, market, manufacture, distribute their soda.

Dr. Pepper just creates and markets their soda. They don't manufacture or distribute their own soda (believe it or not, Pepsi manufactures & distribute Dr Pepper soda).

Web search is served by the Bing Web Search API.

Their ads are also from Microsoft https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...

Fully agree, its an endless cats'n'mice game, as SEO spammers create new pages on new domains with automated wordpress deployments in no-time.

Instead of a blacklist, a whitelist like a curated list of links à la Yahoo would be better approach, or something with upvote/reputation/karma as on HN.

Funny enough. Years back I poked around Google Custom search. As a laugh I used it to index and search Quora (which was still a high quality site then). But I contemplated setting up a series of specialty search engines (e.g., JavaScript) such that I would feed Custom Search a list of URLs and/or rules for what to index.

I never took any further than "what a cool idea".

I'm interested in that alternative too. Does a whitelist like that exist?

Wonder if the alternatives are really fixing the SEO spam problem by improving their algoritms or manually pinning sites like StackOverflow to the top.

Considering this method would be through an ad-block extension, it doesn’t seem as if they would be giving their money to google.

Side question, is there a max number of sites you can block on that list?

Edit: fruedian misread. I thought this was through ublock origin.