I used google for most of my life, for the past couple months I’ve been using brave search, but I still end up using google often because google images is far better than brave search images. I’m also worried that maybe brave search isn’t the best choice. What would you guys recommend?

34 points

I use duckduckgo. It is Bing but with more privacy. You could try also searx, swisscows, startpage or qwant

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4 points

does ddg not have its own search backend anymore?

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1 point

nope, it was yandex + bing, now bing: https://www.searchenginemap.com/

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5 points

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

My reading is that the classic search listings are coming from Bing and the the quick answer type stuff is coming from DDGs systems.

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1 point
*

the the quick answer type stuff is coming from DDGs systems.

which doesn’t an index make, more like a fetcher for specific data

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2 points

I’ve been using DDG for a while but just got hit with an AI summary finally, like Brave and then Google does. It’s such a turn off. I trust the information exactly 0%. Definitely considering just using SearXNG full time now. I liked DDG a lot but I’m so fickle, it doesn’t take much for me to swap.

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5 points

You can disable that. Here are two links that disable that. Add it to Firefox or Chromium through the settings.

Simple, only disables AI answers: https://duckduckgo.com/?kbe=0&q=%s

Long, disables AI answers and ads: https://duckduckgo.com/?kak=-1&kax=-1&kbe=0&k1=-1&q=%s

Steps to create a custom DDG search config:

  • Visit: https://duckduckgo.com/settings
  • Select the settings you want, for example dark mode.
  • Click the “Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data” button.
  • Copy the link, using my dark mode scenario would yield the URL https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d
  • Edit the URL by adding &q=%s to the end, which acts as a placeholder for the browser to replace with your actual search query. Using my example https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&q=%s
  • Last step is add it to your browser. May differ between browsers, but generally look in the search engines tab of the settings.
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1 point

Thanks for the tips but it says that it can be disabled right on the summary itself. The issue isn’t disabling it for me. It’s that the information is bad and I don’t want a search engine that thinks this is useful. Sorry for not making that more clear. That’s what I meant by me being fickle.

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6 points

I use DDG but I’m always open to alternatives.

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18 points

SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

It enhances and respects privacy,
is open source and self hostable,
and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, …)

You can find a list of public hosted instances here:
https://searx.space/

However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.

For this I use:

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3 points

All of them at once: SearXNG.

It aggregates results from whichever you select.

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12 points

I self host my own SearXNG instance. I use that.

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4 points

Me too! Surprisingly easy to set up from docker. Like, four commands?

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1 point

Including setting up docker?

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1 point

Setting up docker to host a couple of containers from Linux is only a couple of commands, depending on your distro. Basically, install a few packages, create a group for docker, add yourself to that group.

Harder in Windows, probably, but I’ve never tried it.

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