I’ve been using duckduckgo for years now with no issues, but today I opened it and realized there were no longer any search results before scrolling. It was all ads/info cards. So I guess I’m looking for a replacement. Any suggestions?
Related: anyone know if there’s a way in the Adnauseum Firefox extension to hide ads on a specific trusted site? I like their goal of not punishing ads following the do not track standard, but DDG has crossed a threshold and I now want to blacklist them specifically.
SearXNG Public Instances List or self host it yourself.
I’ve been testing other search engines, and I found that SearX/SearXNG and Mojeek both turn up results for smaller websites that Google puts in 50th place for the exact title of the website/page.
That sounds like a big plus. Someone else said this was some self hosted thing though which is over my head unfortunately
There are public instances: https://searx.space/
This is one someone previously suggested, and the one I tried that seems to work well: https://search.disroot.org/ - I see it’s not in the list above though. Not sure why.
If you self host, you could try searxng
I’m partial to ecosia.org myself. Search while helping to plant more trees!
I do wonder how they get the money to plant these trees, hmm…
edit: oh, look at that! Even ecosia started getting into AI. Truly impossible for search engines not to get into AI territory these days, funny right? Even kagi did.
Searx
and startpage aredecentStartpage is the same as Google but apparently “proxied”. There’s also that bs with system1.
Not doubting you here, but I just tried searching for two very different terms on DDG on two different devices (Windows laptop and Android phone) and two different browsers (Firefox and Brave), and I didn’t really see any ads or dodgy stuff.
The mobile Firefox version had a couple of main links at the top (they don’t look like ads), and some news cards under that. But the links were all relevant. The desktop DDG was super clean, again no ads.
This was without ad blockers enabled too. I also tried it in private mode, and still clean.
What am I missing? Why is my DDG experience so clean compared to yours?
This was the worst time I’ve seen. Here’s a screenshot. The search term was benaroya hall if you want to try yourself.
Wow. Yeah that sucks!
It really caught me off guard. I had another search later today after I posted this that only had one Ad at the top, so it seems like it depends on the search term. I’m not thrilled this is even possible though 😒
Ahh okay. That would explain it. Yeah, it’s disappointing that DDG is selectively selling out. I get that they need to make money. But the content in that screenshot you shared is just ridiculous.
