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Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

42 points by ldng ↗ HN
More than 10 years ago I dropped Google Search because my searches were enshitified and bubble wrapped and quotes stop to matter so it became impossible to escape the bubble.

As the saying goes, it happened before and will happen again : it now the turn of DuckDuckGo to enshitify my searches by bubblification and ignoring quotes.

Also, not interested in IA chatbot, I prefer multiple sources and to cross-check the information myself, thank you.

What alternatives are you using / recommending ?

33 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 71.1 ms ] thread
spottedmarley
I have roughly the same path as you through default search engines over the years and recently left duckduckgo for ecosia. It's the best alternative I've found and after about a week or two it became second nature just like the ones that came before it. If I don't find what I'm looking for I may still jump over to Google (via incognito window)

p.s ecosia does have their annoying obligatory ai chat bot that attempts to answer things which i could do without but i just mostly ignore it

sangtd
i also use ecosia. actually, ddg, startpage, kagi, or self-hosted search engines are just anonymous queries to google and bing. brave has its own index, but i don't have a very positive impression of the brave browser. so if everything will eventually return to google and bing anyway, why not look at it from a different perspective and use it for reforestation. ecosia's policy is still to send ip addresses to partners like google and bing, but that's just the IP address, not the user profile. google might know where the query is coming from, but it doesn't know who i am. i don't see much point in that. anyway, i'm not doing anything shady; I just don't like feeling like I'm being exploited. but if i know i'm helping the community in some way or doing something meaningful just by querying through ecosia, then i'll accept revealing my ip address to them. oh, and ecosia is partnering with qwant to create its own index, and I will continue to support them
cyanregiment
We need it - I’d use 3 search engines. It’s not like MMOs or social media where 1 winner takes all. I think people want more search options, cloud, email, and so-on.

I once tried to index the web with local Mistral 7b. Here’s what I did:

1. Copy/pasted an English dictionary and removed the definitions, so I just had an Array of about 500k words.

2. Wrote a simple loop to iterate over the words, with the instruction to Mistral to try to guess 10 URLs related to that word. I would typically get 2-3 sites per word.

3. When visiting a site, also check that site for links to other URLs, and summarize it with hash tags, visiting the new sites as well and recursively doing that.

4. Keep a tally of how many sites are being linked to for the page’s “rank”.

In the end you should have a massive list of objects with valid URLs ranked by how popular they are (to each other, by link), and a set of searchable hash tags for each.

I ran this for days and I never got past B, and almost every site was adult content. Most of the sites came from other sites. But it does work! Janky page crawling and ranking.

Anyway more people should take on web search, I agree. LLMs offer shortcuts.

worldsavior
You can use noai.duckduckgo.com if don't want AI, and lite.duckduckgo.com if you don't want bubblification.
kstrauser
I gladly pay for Kagi because the experience is so much better that it’s worth it to me.
whitefang
Does brave search make any sense for you?
santiagobasulto
I love Google's and duck duck go AI suggestions. Am I crazy? I feel like 90% of the time they answer my question right there.

It will definitively be a problem in the long term for monetization of the authors. But for me as a user, it's the best.

dmazin
This feels like a solved problem entirely: Kagi. I don’t know their secret sauce but the results are very high quality.
traceroute66
Ecosia and Qwant have just started collaborating on EUSP (European Search Perspective)[1]

This could easily yield very interesting (i.e. "not just another bing proxy") results once it starts gaining traction.

I use DuckDuckGo at the moment, only because Startpage started making themselves impossible to use when they started aggressively blocking access via VPNs. As other people have already said,see `noai.duckduckgo.com` and `lite.duckduckgo.com` which might address your specific concerns.

If you are a Mullvad user, there is also Mullvad Leta[2], which has been security audited[3].

I might shift more towards Ecosia/Qwant.

[1] https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp-germany-rollout/ [2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/introducing-mullvad-leta-a-searc... [3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/16/security-audit-of-our-...

attendant3446
StartPage doesn't only block VPN access, but also "regular" connections. And what's worse, it doesn't ask to solve some captcha, but blocks you completely and only shows the form where you can say why you think they are wrong.
bronlund
Just use Kagi. Not only is it way better, but you are also not the product.
SyneRyder
If you don't mind paying and someone else having control over your search experience, Kagi is an option. Urkey (sp?) is another new alternative.

If you just want a free search engine, Brave is probably the best index. Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface.

But if you want to go down the rabbit hole, it's easy to build your own metasearch engine and search several engines at once - an AI model can make one for you in a single night with just a small PHP script, if you have your own website / webost. In my case, the combination of Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia covers all my search needs.

Deeper down the rabbit hole, you can build your own search index with SQLite, as an additional index for your metasearch. There are projects like Hister that will help make your own search index:

https://hister.org/

axegon_
Annoyingly search was at large solved just a few years ago and sadly someone has to reinvent the wheel soon. Lately I've completely switched to ecosia. It gives really decent results for the time being, hoping it'd improve with their co-op with qwant. I also run searxng behind a tor proxy and while it does a pretty solid job overall, it still relies entirely on other search engines so it's not a question of "if" but "when" will it degrade massively.

As for Kagi - they've earned a life-long ban from me for political reasons.

tunapizza
Another happy Kagi subscriber here. It's been 1.5 years now, and I've never looked back.
supersparrow
Another vote for Kagi from me. Been using it for 3 years now and not looked back. When you accidentally use Google to search, or use a browser with defaults, you will notice really how crap Google/Bing are!
erelong
https://search.brave.com

other things that came up in a search not mentioned in post yet (that I have heard of before):

mojeek or yacy - are these any good?

list of searx instances (I've used some of these a while ago but not recently so idk of their quality currently): https://searx.space/

gtfiorentino
Hi, I work on Search at DuckDuckGo. Can you clarify what you mean by “bubblification”? Would be interested to know what has changed for you as a long-time user.
NishanStepak
I had a little money invested in Presearch through Wefunder, but it went bust a few days ago. I thought it was interesting. Maybe someone can buy out the technology.
ndom91
I'm a bit of a privacy nerd, but even so it still took me a while to convince myself it was worth paying for a search engine.

Ever since getting over that, however, I've been extremely happy with Kagi. Couldn't recommend it more.

snapplebobapple
Brave search is decent. Moat of the time the ai bubble at the top juat has the answer too
s0m3_rnd0m
So much love for Kagi going around, yet people seem to forget or are not familiar with all the history and facts behind the company and their CEO...

If interested, read this https://paste.rs/MzFL9