DeGoogle Yourself

4get.ca

DuckDuckGo/Bing is pretty bad at finding stuff in my native language. That's why I use Startpage (and sometimes even Google) more nowadays.

You can try hosting a searxng instance. If not try some public searxng instances. https://searx.space/

you can search through brave or google using mullvads leta:

https://leta.mullvad.net/

Been using Qwant for about a month. Feels like of like old Google did, very happy.

Only place it’s lacking is image search, but Google has been pretty shite for the past year too.

i have noticed that i get fewer results from ddg lately, and local (server-side geoip driven) and totally irrelevant shit frequently thrown in starting below the fold on page 1.

but ddg has been my go-to for years. and very rarely do i need to look elsewhere for a different 'perspective'--picking from the others configured in my browser: ecosia, startpage, qwant, mojeek. i have a couple instances of self-hostable meta engines in there too, but those are too unreliable to count on for regular use.

I’ve tried other search engines any times. Despite the worsening google search somehow is still much better than alternatives.

I think in the last few years DDG has been improving and google has been worsening for general searching. Because I have nearly stopped using !g before I used it constantly.

I still use google at work as the results there match a bit better.

I haven't really experienced a worsening of DDG, and this is a bit off topic, perhaps, but—

I have yet to find a better alternative to Google's video search. Google Books also remains valuable in many ways, since it will give you different "search inside the book"-type search results than the Internet Archive will (and they also have some books that IA does not).

What's annoying to me is that StartPage, which is supposed to have Google search results, and by and large does, does not give the same video results as Google (go ahead, try it). It would also be nice to have an Invidious or FreeTube type front end for Google Books, and I believe there used to be something like that, but not any longer.

Some Google products still have definite value, it's just important that they derive no benefit from us using them.

I use DDG and can't say I've had an uptick in the amount of !g I have to do. The only one recently was for an image search but that's pretty normal when looking for something obscure.

Don't have any solutions, but figured another input might be interesting.

Btw https://mwmbl.org/ is an interesting project, although not usable yet

The vast majority of the quality comes from the result ranking (that is what people generally refer as indexes albeit indexes are slightly different conceptually). In practice there are two main indexes/ranking (a) Google (b) Bing. DDG, Ecosia, yahoo are, at best, tuning the ranking (not sure if they make things better or worse with that).

This is the reason if you want meaningfully better quality you need searXNG. Because combining results from multiple search engines you grt both main indexes.

There is a ranking/quality problem there as well because how do you join the results of multiple search engines? I think it simply uses a “voting” system where it bumps the results from most search engines. This also means that you want a “balanced” number of search engines based on Google and Bing otherwise you’ll get mainly Google or mainly bing results. Or you may just enable only Google and Bing, really 🤷‍♂️

If there will be new indexes (e.g. the new European one) you may want to enable them as well but this kind of problems take time to become competitive with giants like Google and Bing (albeit with enshittification this gap is being reduced)

Startpage uses Google's results, similar to like DDG uses Bing's, I find to be splendid replacement for spying engine.