this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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I really hope no one in this community uses Google as their search engine.
I primarily use DuckDuckGo now, but very occasionally I use google when I feel like DuckDuckGo hasn't come up with very good results.
(I also use Google when I need a word definition - I like the layout and ability to see synonyms quickly.)
Bing I don't use because I just can't stand the results page layout.
Any other recommendations?
You can use Startpage to get Google search results. It's a meta search engine for Google, but it doesn't expose any of your data. You can use it with DuckDuckGo's Bangs feature. That way, DuckDuckGo can be your default search engine and you can make all of your normal search queries with DDG, but if you want to search on Google through Startpage, you just type !sp followed by your search query into DuckDuckGo and it will forward your search to Startpage. This also works with many many other sites, type !bangs into DDG to get the full list of supported websites.
Thanks for the startpage tip. Just switched all my browsers to use it instead.
Why use !sp instead of !g?
Startpage gives you Google search results without exposing your data to Google. It's better for your privacy.
Startpage sends your search term to google without your ip address.
Guess what Duckduckgo with the !g bang does?
!g sends you to the Google website, obviously Google gets your IP, browser fingerprint, etc. that way
Cool, I'll give this a try too.
Bing nowdays result is better than Google,just DDG result still not 100% good as bing.. so.. I choose bing for now..
You always have to add the clause "in my native language" to such statements.
I have the same experience with DDG. Which is why I use DDG with bangs to search for results on other engines in my native language.
SearXNG is my go to. It's a search aggregator so you have to configure it to select your preferred search engines, but once everything is up and running, I've found it's results to be even higher quality than Google's
Sounds interesting. I'll take a look, thanks.
yeah that's one thing I really miss from when I had google as default search engine, typing word/phrase + define and actually getting a useful result. DDGs version is barely even helpful at all
If you're already using duckduckgo, you can just add !g in front of your search term if you aren't happy with the results.
It sends your search to google but without connecting your search with your ip.
And if you use an ad blocker, google doesn't even get anything out of it, other than server costs.
Not true
Google Search is way worse than it used to but still beats DDG by a mile.
I've tried SearX and it was meh, maybe there's some better instance than the one I tried though.
Yandex is good for reverse image search and when the American government makes western search engines block certain search results, but not that useful in general. Also for a period Yandex just kept bombarding me with endless captchas and was completely unusuable
Bing search is just DDG, or well DDG is just Bing.
Baidu search, tbh haven't tried it much, but even for chinese I had better search results on google search so yeah
DDG is still really good, and DDG isn't Bing just because it includes it's results as well. I mainly use DDG and then try Google if I can't find my result, but 90% of the time DDG finds it just fine.
I mean I use DDG as default search engine in Firefox and Google Search isn't much better now, but google search isn't even a 10th as good as it used to be 10 years ago.
I use https://searx.be/ with both Google and DDG results enabled. Otherwise if you want something like Google results you would have to use Start page, although they pay Google for access to their search so you would be indirectly supporting Google.
Maybe try Startpage, it gives you Google results without exposing your data to Google.
I tried using DuckDuckGo but just could not stick with it. The search terms are just not as good and sometimes when I’m looking up definitions for words I’d prefer not clicking on a link and just having it display on the display results.
It’s just small issues like that made me switch back to google search. Won’t ever switch back to chrome though.
Maybe try Startpage, it gives you Google results without exposing your data to Google.
Incredibly enough, Bing became better than Google.