this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself

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search engine megathread? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 6 days ago by ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.org to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml
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I'd like to start a thread for people to share what they're using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.

I'm doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my "stack" has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.

My (shitty and getting worse) solution:

  • DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG's relevance has been shit for its entire existence
  • StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
  • currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it's not easy to set up if you don't use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with

The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn't return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.

BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.

I'd love to hear suggestions.

tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines

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[–] PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I just want to say I disagree about the decline, I think there was a time there was huge decline indeed, first there were too much shitty autogenerated and bait content getting high in the index, then they shoved more and more sponsored results and early filter bias were shitty, but I believe it all improved greatly in later years, specially with AI search, Google indeed manages to give you most relevant stuff on top now, and most of times it will cover all you are asking, I find the difference from other engines noticeable, the problem is that Google is fucking cancer...
I mostly use Starpage, sometimes results aren't too good and I go to DuckDuckGo. I sometimes use Leta and Brave Search as well, but there are times I need to Google, especially for shopping.