Been looking for a search engine that isn’t plauged with SEO garbage every time I look for anything. Been using DDG for quite a long time now, and I’m starting to get dissatisfied with results. It seems like more and more results are just companies trying to make their way to the top of the search results instead of anything organic. It’s even worse when I look for any kind of service or product.

Looking for as close to 100% organic results as possible.

  • cerement@slrpnk.net
    152·
    1 year ago
    • so yeah, Google is Google, the very definition of SEO – to the point now they will completely ignore your query to show you “relevant” results
    • and Bing is Microsoft, ’nuff said – although I hear they seem to be THE choice for porn searches …
    • people have been claiming DuckDuckGo has become just a frontend for Bing which is why their results have been declining 🤷
    • ad tech company System1 owns a majority stake of Startpage – apparently they’ve mollified PrivacyTools that it would not impact Startpage’s privacy focused mission
    • Qwant out of France actually seems to be stepping up as a good netizen, not only focusing on privacy but also investing in privacy initiatives in EU
    • otherwise you’re stuck bouncing around SearX SearXNG instances – Google and Bing REALLY don’t like meta search engines and will regularly block overactive instances

    EDIT: looks like SearX is pretty much dead and had been replaced by SearXNG

    • birdcat@lemmy.ml
      8·
      1 year ago

      Qwant “The search engine that doesn’t know anything about you, …”

      Clicks on link: “Unfortunately we are not yet available in your country.”

      🤔

      • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
        5·
        1 year ago

        What’s most annoying about the “tailored experience” is that they presume to know what you’re looking for, even though you directly told them what to show you. They don’t give a fuck about relevancy, they’re going to show you whatever is going to make them the most money, which usually means corporate ad crap, and outrage news. Plus if they show you shit results then you’ll search multiple times and they’ll get to show you 4 times the ads.

    • V ‎ ‎ @beehaw.org
      3·
      1 year ago

      These points seem to mirror my experience for the most part. DuckDuckGo has also been going downhill because certain search modifiers don’t work anymore. Microsoft raised the price of API queries which in turn made it too expensive for DuckDuckGo to maintain certain ones. I mostly enjoyed it because it gives you access to Bing’s search results without the user-hostile UX garbage Microsoft loves to put on all its products. These days I’m using Kagi. It’s been about six months now and I’m really enjoying it.

    • Geth@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’d be curious to understand what Qwant brings extra to the table compared to DDG. Backend is the same, results seem quite similar and it’s missing some things like math and conversion quick tools.