Basically, I have seeing more and more search engines serving irrelevant search results for a query. Even some results have no answer related to the query you want to ask. Even Google (not privacy respecting) also suffers from this problem nowadays but it’s far better than privacy focused search engines. Situation has gotten so worse, that I have to append reddit at the end of the query to find some answers. I don’t know if it’s just me or is everyone experiencing this? Do you know a privacy search engine that provides good results? Duckduckgo, Brave Search (little better than others) and Startpage are just trash nowadays.
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I can confirm this, privacy-respecting search engines (at least all the ones I have tried, including the ones recommended by PG) are not feasible for technical and academic work, especially for someone who searches a lot of very specific, science and biology related stuff.
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Startpage gives me the same results as google
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It used to; now they show the same results as DuckDuckGo.
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Damn. I was just trying to get it (startpage) to default search engine in Vanadium. If that is the case I’ll just use Google…
Been using duckduckgo for a while until I was playing around some and found essentially that the search results are much better for Google…
Privacy yes, but I guess everyone has to choose thier inconvenience lol
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There is also an issue with seo optimized empty sites, copycat sites, etc. You may clean search results by blacklisting bad sites with uBlacklist extension or maybe try some easy way with GitHub - quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter: Filters to block and remove copycat-websites from DuckDuckGo, Google and other search engines. Specific to dev websites like StackOverflow or GitHub.
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For me it still does. Would be unusable in Portugal otherwise, and they are most likely aware of that. It will depend on your location and language
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I’ll give it a shot anyways. Won’t take longer than a week to find out for my location
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brave goggles achieves similar. it’s limited to brave search but its integrated in the search engine itself
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Yes, Google is the best search engine currently, especially, for my native language. Moreover, it works very well with Google Maps, which is the most accurate and useful map in the world.
Google products are high quality. It’s just that privacy is not on their roadmap.
I am not prioritize the switch, I will use what’s work best for my use case. Luckily, Brave Search works most of the times. I only use Google Search as my last resort.
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I talked to the Arkenfox creator, this is how he responded to my question:
Unrelated question, but is using Google on Arkenfox okay due Arkenfox’s “defenses”, or should I use DuckDuckGo regardless
Answer:
up to you - do you trust (or care about) google? I use google (on nightly) because I basically only ever do very specific (tech) searches and only google is good enough to find my shit. Otherwise (both my main AF and nightly) non tech searches I use wikipedia or an IMDB search engine I added back in 1929, and I have DDG there as well. That pretty much covers it
but I also never need to sign in anywhere with google, and I block a fair bit of google related domains on all scopes via uBO, and I never use youtube, or gmail, or google docs … etc. And I sanitize on close (all site data). So pretty much as far as I’m concerned, google doesn’t track me - they only monetize my searches - which is just going to be boring tech shit. And each session, it’s just another new shadow profile - except of course they will leverage my IP and maybe some FPing. I honestly don’t know what they do for tracking in this regard (FPing).
but if you log in with google somewhere, this will open up your traffic to them as well since it allows the 3rd party to act as first party. And then there is the site exception for keeping some cookies + site data, that also disables partitioning for those domains see #1448
So you do you
You want the web to be usable, and no doubt you want searches to be useful. DDG is certainly more private and doesn’t shadow profile you or try to track you across the internet. So maybe use DDG as a default, but leave google as an option. And/or add extra search engines - e.g. I’m always looking shit up on wikipedia and imdb - this means bypassing all search engines and directly talking to the 1st party site I wanted in the first place
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What I got was, skip the general search engine when you can and use the site’s internal search → Then use DDG for all the things. → If it dont give the right result, there is the G! search function.
It seems like a sane take on usability/privacy.
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Amazing summarisation, thanks!
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For me it’s Brave => !ddg =>!g
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i wish brave had a mullvad leta bang so i could use that instead of !g
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This, but Brave → !d → !s
(Brave, DDG, Startpage)
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You don’t have to always start with Google. I use Google when I’m searching for work things or academic related things (or Google Scholar, or a library search, etc). But for all random inquiries, I always start with DDG. If that doesn’t find anything, I move to Google.
Back in the “old days,” we used to have to Google things over and over again, trying different phrases, just to get good results. I guess I’m still used to that. If you want your questions answered and to feel good after a single search, use Google from the start. It provides the best results, and because they know who you are, they’ll give you heavily catered results that are potentially less accurate sometimes (but YOU will think it’s more accurate, because it aligns with your desires).
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I find Kagi great in terms of search results, even for niche or nuanced searches. Of course, Kagi itself is a niche option, as it is a paid service. Still may be worth looking into however.
Also worth noting that it does require an account as a paid service, but it doesn’t require any personal information, and doesn’t require a real email.
Edit: as others have brought up with DDG, bangs can be very useful as well, and Kagi has a bangs implementation too
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Thanks to all who replied. I have been researching this whole day and I found that main culprit behind dropping quality of search engines is because of the platforms locking themselves up. Also the search engines implementing machine learning and other tactics to push their own results rather than organic ones is also responsible. I have settled on brave and if I couldn’t find anything I can use google bang on brave thanks.
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After about 20+ years in the SEO and online marketing field I can say that Google isn’t organic focused anymore. Google is more user and political focused now then ever before. Even new searchsessions make your results userdriven by for example fingerprints and your contacts, friends and location. Google shows more and more what they want you to focus on, especially on climate, medical and political searches. When a site nowadays post something what triggers the negative AI of Google, your site gets very quickly downgraded or even totally removed from searchresults even when you have a very good qualitative site. Play it like Google wants and make it to a good searchresult position.
DDG is leaning on Bing financial and results wise. Privacy goes a long way but Bing/Microsoft wants always something in return 
At this moment I use mostely https://search.disroot.org based on SearXNG (forked SearX) which is highly configurable in terms of which Searchengines and which categories.
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