Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of "AI" stuff, but come on, one of these isn't even in English, and that's what I have my language set to.
I'm just trying to search for a website...
Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of "AI" stuff, but come on, one of these isn't even in English, and that's what I have my language set to.
80 Comments
Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world · 91 pts · 175d
blinfabian@feddit.nl · 13 pts · 175d
yup, literally just use a good seatch engine and you'll find everything you need (idek what OP is using is that startpage?)
Turret3857@infosec.pub · 10 pts · 174d
OP is using SearxNG, an Open-Source, Self Host able metasearch engine which is not going to work well unless you set your own settings correctly and tailor them to how you use the web. StartPage is just proxied google results. SearxNG can proxy StartPage, but these results are from Bing.
cloudskater@pawb.social · 3 pts · 172d
Yeah I didn't realize my settings weren't configured right, so I did so, came back today and found they were switched back! That's why I was struggling. I have SearxNG in my whitelist for cookies too, so no idea why that's happening. With the settings changed, it works great!
Yliaster@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 174d
How's Qwant in terms of search results and privacy/AI?
I've been using startpage (it's an improvement over Mojeek, that was kinda unusable).
Zerush@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 174d
Mojeek has improved a lot in last times. Is a good alternative, but always good to use several search engines for different tasks, all they have its + and -, eg Startpage is good for image search, Andi is fine for semantic and concept searches with excelent summaries, Mojeek and Qwant for general websearch, etc.- In the Vivaldi forum you can find the, maybe, most complete list of search engines out there which you can test (all include the needed insert code to add these direct to the list in your browser - 19 page thread)
blinfabian@feddit.nl · 1 pts · 174d
search results: they used to suck when i tried using qwant a year ago, but now theyre the exact same as on ecosia and google from my experience
privacy: this is what they say on their website
AI: havent spotted any ai featurea yet
Yliaster@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 174d
I'm a bit distrustful of the current french political scene and macron's involvement in their phasing out of American tech (which is in principle good but it's the actors here that are sus).
cloudskater@pawb.social · 9 pts · 175d
I know. I'm trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org · 75 pts · 175d
The
noai.duckduckgo.comURL is important to notice in the screenshot.wobblyunionist@piefed.social · 29 pts · 175d
zikzak025@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 175d
That's my take as well. You can also remove AI results from Google by adding the &udm=14 string to force web results only, but it doesn't absolve them of blame for how much they push AI. DDG deserves equal criticism.
It's like old Reddit. Sure it still exists, but it only gets worse and worse as they double down on the version everyone hates until the majority don't even know there's another option. And there's no guarantee they keep supporting the option that makes them less money.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org · 7 pts · 175d
Possibly, though as another commenter mentioned, using the noai URL for the moment is a good way to voice discontent. Not using it just falls into the "everyone uses google" narrative in a different way.
seathru@quokk.au · 20 pts · 175d
https://voteyesornoai.com/
If DDG's own poll didn't spell that out for them, I don't think they care.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org · 4 pts · 175d
Yeah, fair point. I wish DDG were going in a different direction.
bright_side_@piefed.world · 3 pts · 175d
Well that's interesting as a poll result. 👍
The article behind the link at the bottom of the site shows that this is a marketing stunt
the poll numbers are still 😇
cloudskater@pawb.social · 1 pts · 172d
Yeah, that's why I'm getting away from them. Thankfully the issue I was having seems to be a config issue and not a problem with SearxNG.
Canconda@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 175d
You really do either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
LostWanderer@fedia.io · 9 pts · 175d
SearXNG is a mixed bag to be honest...I find that Ononoki's SearXNG delivers decent results...It's a bit mixed at times with PieFed being the third option. Some topics are surfaced better than others, so your mileage will vary with SearXNG.
Using the No AI version of DuckDuckGo sends them a message that their bet on "AI" isn't going to win them any accolades. It's an easy way to push back. As they are tracking those metrics and people can see the numbers of how many users disapprove of AI.
potatoguy@mbin.potato-guy.space · 6 pts · 175d
Bing and yahoo are VERY bad, it seems they detect that they are being used through proxies, I made another comment for what i use in searxng.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 175d
DDG's backend is really just Bing, though ...
potatoguy@mbin.potato-guy.space · 5 pts · 175d
They give different results, it seems they have different treatment to the data, which is interesting. Startpage gives different results than google, duckduckgo gives different results than bing, but on the bigger picture, a bigger sample gives the statistically optimal result??? (closer to the source truth on the most probable good result) question mark, huge number theory on statistics.
(i'm drunk)
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 175d
Bing in a sandboxed session yielded results identical to DDG in my experiments.
potatoguy@mbin.potato-guy.space · 2 pts · 175d
In searxng they don't give the same results, bing brings some completely different stuff both on an selfhosted instance and on an public instance (it just gives random garbage), it seems proxying does some stuff to bings internal algorithm, as google is different than startpage on searxng.
Edit: a screenshot showing it.
can_you_change_your_username@fedia.io · 2 pts · 175d
Given the same methodology (search algorithm) a larger sample size gives a truer picture of what that methodology favors. If the methodology isn't neutral or doesn't bias in the same way as your desired outcome then a smaller sample size analyzed by a different methodology may provide better results.
LostWanderer@fedia.io · 3 pts · 175d
Ah shit, I forgot to turn both those off. Ugh, I've been playing browser shuffle...Good catch!
tyler@programming.dev · 4 pts · 175d
What search engine?
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 175d
It's just Bing wearing a duck hat anyway
starblursd@lemmy.zip · -8 pts · 175d
I use brave search, in the settings you can turn off ai answer and anonymous telemetry
myrmidex@belgae.social · 30 pts · 175d
I'll just leave this here: https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
U7826391786239@lemmy.zip · 27 pts · 175d
myrmidex@belgae.social · 7 pts · 175d
Same, been there too. Still, it's easy to miss articles on them, they only pop up once every so often. Same for Proton.
Tchallenge@awful.systems · 3 pts · 175d
I might be a bit out of the loop, what about proton? I know they have their own AI chatbot, but did I miss anything else about them? AFAIK they are nowhere near Brave in terms of being utter garbage.
myrmidex@belgae.social · 5 pts · 175d
No, it's nowhere near that, still the CEO came out in favor of Trump so I had to ditch them too.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
Jack@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 175d
Several useless slop paragraphs in that article - seems to have been written by LLM.
Human summary: Brave is a Chromium-based browser that is recommended by some for privacy. It's created by homophobe and Republican donor Brendan Eich, who was asked by several Mozilla employees to resign and led to half of Mozilla's board to step down. After OKCupid started pointing out his homophobia to Mozilla browsers users, he finally quit.
After that he created Brave with millions of dollars from amongst others Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.
In 2016 the "Brave Ad Replacement" was announced which would replace ads on pages with ones injected by Brave, paying in crypto.
Brave collected donations in their crypto on behalf of people like Tom Scott without asking them, and when Tom found out and told Brave to stop, Brave said "refunds are impossible".
In 2020 Brave Browser silently injected referral links into URLs of crypto wallets containing Brave's affiliate code.
By default they display sponsored images as the background for the home and new tab pages.
In 2021 Brave Browser exposed the .onion domains people visited as part of the DNS traffic so their ISPs could track users.
In 2023 Brave announced that they'd be selling their search data to AI companies, and prevented sites from opting out of this even if they asked not to be scraped by Brave.
In 2024 Brave deprecated their option for Strict fingerprinting protection.
Brave also paid for advertisement whenever users searched for "Firefox" in the Play Store, displaying "Forget the Fox", which Brave's VP (who promoted NFTs and FTX with AI) denied - meaning he was lying or didn't find out before denying it.
starblursd@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 173d
See now. This is much better and informative. Just saying he's an anti-vaxxer and pro-ai pro-crypto. Especially like the last 3 to 4 things.
bright_side_@piefed.world · 2 pts · 175d
Nice to find an up to date article, thanks
wobblyunionist@piefed.social · 1 pts · 175d
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 11 pts · 175d
So you know:
CEO is a anti-vaxxer anti-masker asshole, and incredibly pro-AI and pro-crypto.
Also the browser did at one point "accidentally" have a crypto farm built into it.
starblursd@lemmy.zip · -11 pts · 175d
I'm so tired of the insistence that you have to agree with everything that the CEO does or says if you use a piece of software... You can turn off the ai and crypto in browser settings with a couple clicks. Also I'm talking about the search engine not the browser. I don't use the browser purely because the Linux builds split mode doesn't work nearly as clean as Zen, plus i prefer Firefox forks
I use it cause it's a search engine that gives good results and that can disable ai answers... Until I'm able to get my server PC finished to selfhost searxng
Edit they actually slopped up the browser to the point it's beyond disabling it. Literally just garbage
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 174d
I could understand your point if they were literally the only option
But they're not.
So why choose the worst option when better exist?
And you know how money works right? The CEO gets money for your continued usage of their products and services. So by using it, you directly support all their shitty views.
starblursd@lemmy.zip · -1 pts · 174d
Really not how that works... Do you use a phone? Guess you agree with child labor then cause they make money from your purchase
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 174d
Did you read this part at all?
I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
starblursd@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 175d
I don't care what a CEO (for free software) thinks or says I care what the software does. Is the software good?... The browser no. It's complete garbage the search engine. Yeah it's pretty decent. If the CEO's garbage ideals bleed into the software like it does in the browser, yeah it's trash. The search engine like almost every other mainstream search engine has AI answers except unlike a lot of others it lets you turn that off. It doesn't skew results towards his ideals, doesn't bury results under sponsored links, Has no crypto nonsense, it's just a search engine. It's not that deep
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 174d
Lol, just did the same thing.
DaMummy@hilariouschaos.com · 1 pts · 174d
That's because this is an ad for PieFed.
cloudskater@pawb.social · 2 pts · 172d
lol no I just didn't realize I had my stuff configured wrong. But I was searching for Piefed with the intent to join bc Lemmy's devs suck and yeah, shit's good. So if you want, you can consider this reply an ad for Piefed, tho it's actually a neutral endorsement :3
bright_side_@piefed.world · 24 pts · 175d
Instead of getting a search service with some ads on the side, you're provided ads with search results sprinkled in
potatoguy@mbin.potato-guy.space · 21 pts · 175d
Bing on searxng is shit, yahoo ultimately is bad too, I use this combination, it helps a lot:
cloudskater@pawb.social · 2 pts · 172d
Hell yeah I only enabled a couple of these and it already helps a lot, thank you!
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 17 pts · 175d
Switch to Startpage, it's actually pretty great
privatepirate@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 175d
I like Startpage, but I had to switch to DDG because it was giving me captchas constantly for using a VPN.
arcine@jlai.lu · 3 pts · 174d
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 174d
Wait, it is?
enbiousenvy@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 174d
Startpage is System1
SushiSushi@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 175d
I moved to startpage sinc eit was default when i moved to waterfox. Its mostly been good, but I've had a few times where it's been painful slow.
xvertigox@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 175d
Zerush@lemmy.ml · 15 pts · 175d
In Startpage
Groot
Mojeek
e tools
Fireball
etc....
rimu@piefed.social · 14 pts · 175d
This doesn't look right:
I use searxng too, it's decent mostly. Check your language settings?
bright_side_@piefed.world · 5 pts · 175d
I see you're trying to solve the problem, that's nice 🙂
But I had to laugh at the sites logic: Let's detect users language, Ah! Must be country xyz, with knowing that: Go to chat GPT and ask there 😂
It's such a bad search result, doesn't matter if language is set or not.
cloudskater@pawb.social · 4 pts · 175d
Whaaat? That's bizarre, I swear I had that set.
Nope, it wasn't set. Still returned weird results so I'll try that configuration the other commenter posted.
ICastFist@programming.dev · 13 pts · 175d
Not even google tries to hide it
arcine@jlai.lu · 12 pts · 174d
mlg@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 175d
I searched up how to stop a stratis pool (Redhat knockoff ZFS) and Google gleefully gave me instructions to destroy the stratis pool, and then claimed there was no way to take down a stratis pool without destroying the data.
I think clicked on the top link which was a RedHat article that told you right from the beginning that it's
stratis pool stop --nameOnly reason I had to even search was because I didn't have the stratis CLI installed, so no manpage
mech@feddit.org · 6 pts · 175d
We're rapidly approaching a time where you have to curate your own list of helpful websites again, cause search engines are useless.
https://www.mankier.com/
Zephorah@discuss.online · 11 pts · 175d
I hate subs, for any kind of entertainment most of all, but I think they’re necessary for VPN/private email.
I’m adding an another item to that list. Kagi. De-enshittified search results. My partner bought it, so it’s a shared sub, but I’m sold on it. It’s like it’s 2005 again, and that’s a good thing.
bright_side_@piefed.world · 1 pts · 175d
Also heard praise and got recommended personally to me.
LucidNightmare@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 174d
I tried it out one time because another user here, Tal, usually put it into their very well made comments, so I tried it out.
Yeah, I've been paying for it for almost two years(?) and I never have these difficulties any more. Very happy customer. :)
dragon_gm@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 175d
to use searx(ng) effectively you'll need to set up your own preferences, not the default
from the screenshot, the instance caches and shows results from bing only, ass.
it also use
autoas default which will show personalized language results based on the instance's ip (although it's mainly yours), change that toallyou can do both just by changing and saving your preferences. for example here's mine
Renat@szmer.info · 3 pts · 175d
I use Qwant search
vividspecter@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 175d
The language detection is a bit bugged currently. Set default language to "all" in the UI (or set in the config file).
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 175d
Use startpage or kagi or searxng
blitzen@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 175d
I’ve been genuinely happy with Kagi.
Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 174d
Dave@lemmy.nz · 5 pts · 175d
I love that you can rewrite URLs. Reddit seems to block old.reddit.com from being indexed, but I have a URL rewrite in Kagi so you can site: reddit.com (or use a Reddit lense) then when you click links it goes to old.reddit.com
Literally the only case I use this but it's the example Kagi uses so it was probably made specifically for this purpose.
bilb@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 174d
I wasn't aware of that feature, thanks.
rain_worl@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 169d
that is searx, searxng is pretty much the same
Etterra@discuss.online · 1 pts · 174d
I switched to Quant.
Dezorian@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 174d
Did that too, but I always make a typo and end up using Qwant. Works great though.
Etterra@discuss.online · 1 pts · 167d
LOL good choice
Zerush@lemmy.ml · -4 pts · 175d
Searching "piefed" with Andisearch, it's for me the only acceptable AI (Andi GitHub)
Its Summary
[^3]: PieFed - Join the Fediverse [^5]: pyfedi - Codeberg [^7]: Lemmy vs PieFed - Lemmy.ca
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 174d
rain_worl@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 169d
oh come on!