Been slowly running into more results from DDG that seem to have some “personal parameter” or difference in search results. I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see that the searches aren’t 100% matching up either.
I see this as only getting worse, I want to be able to enter a search and it searches for my query. Not based on my personality or whatever info is being collected. Does anyone know a search engine that’s reliable and focuses on giving the same results and doesn’t try this “personalized” crap?
I had been using DDG for years but switched to SearXNG last fall after reading about it on Lemmy. It’s a privacy focused meta-search engine that can even be self-hosted. It’s wildly customizable and I’ve been pretty happy with the results.
If you’re not interested in self-hosting, or just want to test drive it a bit, there are lots of public instances you can use as well.
Man I fucking love this community sometimes. This is like the 5th fantastic self hostable open source software I’ve seen since joining lemmy, and every time, it gives me that feeling of discovering the internet all over again.
I’m clearly not understanding something here, but I thought search engines would require loads of space to index all the internet. Just thinking about the ability to search for code on stackoverflow seems like loads already.
Edit:
Found it!
SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
Looks very interesting, thanks for commenting about it.
Ugh. I use DDG for the privacy, because it sure as fuck isn’t a good search engine.
There aren’t any good search engines anymore, because there isn’t a good internet anymore. SOE has buried the internet’s wealth of information and centralization starved out all the spaces where information used to be. Hell half the forums that used to appear in search results aren’t even online anymore, and live only in the way back machine (which doesn’t come up in results).
There’s so little to find anymore compared to the halcyon days of search engines we remember.
I use DDG for the privacy as well, but personally I think it works better than Google in my field (software development). The only issue I personally have with DDG is that it lags behind Google in terms of updates, I notice when searching for something that came out or happened only recently.
This would be a major issue, because DDG specifically claims it does not store any identifying information about you.
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see that the searches aren’t 100% matching up either.
my guess is this is just variation in the search algorithms over time. excerpt from their privacy policy above which I think can explain most of the variability you mentioned:
“For example, we may know that we got a lot of searches for “cute cat pictures” today, but we don’t know who actually performed those searches. That is, viewing search results on DuckDuckGo is anonymous. And we only save these anonymous search queries — completely disconnected from any unique identifiers like IP addresses — for just enough time to analyze anonymous trends like popular searches, so that we can better serve you. For local search results in particular, we’ve further engineered a solution to shield your precise location from us and our content providers that sends us a random location nearish to you, which we also never log to disk.”
So they do use your geo IP and popular searches to weigh results which can change over time.
Yep.
For the simple response - they group all the searches from your location based on IP, and the results are weighted from that.
So if your town has a airshow on, all the DDG users that search for airshow near you will bump those responses up the weighting scale for all uses in your area. Regardless of you search for it.
Well. Isn’t ddg just a Bing API?
pretty much: https://www.searchenginemap.com/, used to be +the Yandex API
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