I would like to direct the reader to Yacy. It’s a free-software, self-hosted search-engine. Users have the option to peer with other users, creating a larger decentralised search engine.
Build it. Use it. Promote it. Finance it. Bupf it, for short. Build the future you want or piss and moan endlessly.
Ddg:
Ran https://voteyesornoai.com/ Where of 175k people, 90% said No AI
Offers noai.duckduckgo.com, presumably to cater to this 90% who don’t want it.
Has AI first features in main product. Does not advertise noai much.
So…
- It’s primary product goes against it’s market research
- It’s pushing AI, not promoting the alternative
- People keep promoting ddg for (2) despite (1)
Just seems weird.
Part of the problem is that most of these privacy-protecting search engines are just the big search engines re-packaged; DuckDuckGo is Bing, and Startpage is Google. SearchXNG is just an aggregator, and so is Kagi. What we really need are some alternative engines that function as well as Google used to. I would be willing to pay for that, as relying on ads clearly doesn’t work.
DuckDuckGo=Bing is a misnomer - DDG uses a basket of search indexes excluding google, and I believe Bing’s percentage keeps shrinking (last I checked it was 15%)
Didn’t know that, I’ll give Startpage a try since for me DDG sucks
Mojeek and Qwant both have independent indexes but afaik have no paid teir
Unfortunately, neither is anywhere close to how good Google used to be, unless they’ve improved in leaps and bounds since I last tried them. I just want to be able to use boolean search terms again, and the fact that most modern search engines don’t utilize them has me tearing my hair out.
I know Ecosia relies on Bing and Google but i have found their search results is the best of any of the “privacy” focused search engines
You should know:
On DDG is “Search Assist” the same thing as “Duck.ai?” Must confess that the former can be extremely useful sometimes, as long as I check its references.
dont tell me what to do
30% growth is great, but that still means google controls, like, 90% of search in absolute numbers?
