DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes

DuckDuckGo.

Like others have said, there's really no getting around that Google has the best search engine from a functional standpoint. So I use DuckDuckGo for my personal reasons, but if I'm dissatisfied with the results, I will open up a "private" browser and do a Google search.

Edit: I'll add that this doesn't happen very often. The last time I had to do this was maybe a month and some change ago.

Qwant on my computers and DDG on my mobile.

I tired it. I'm not unintelligent, and it was far too complex of a setup for me. I did not care for it. But that's just me.

Quite a lot of the time. It's pretty damn awful, actually.

Can you please expand on your arguments?

The CEO said some stuff.

IIRC a blogger said something unfavourable and he went thermo nuclear. Not that big a deal.

At the time though it seemed like the alternatives were just as good.

I use DDG as well. Have for years now, it's actually gotten to the point where it gives similar if not better results than Google Search for me now.

search.brave.com is pretty good, as is DuckDuckGo. But I've lately taken a liking to qwant.com. it's pretty good and not American.

https://search.marginalia.nu/ is pretty awesome for getting human generated / small web content.

If I'm looking for people sharing my hyper-fixation https://aboutideasnow.com/ is excellent. https://searchmysite.net/ is a indieweb opti-in only tool with similar usecases but not much is there. Lemmy

https://www.mojeek.com/ I have as my default browser search to try to support as its the only real large index comparable to Google and Bing (DDG uses), but it falls short a lot.

DDG is my primary engine when I need something fast / the others don't work.

If I can't find it in the small web and regular search fails, I'll sometimes try the udm14 Google trick https://udm14.com/

After that its posting to the askfedi hashtag (or ask here)

TIL about that option, thanks.

For programming questions why not use an LLM? The days of searching a specific problem are long done. LLM+Documentation is all you really need now days.

I switched from DuckDuckGo to Waterfox's paid search engine (https://search.waterfox.com) because I wanted to send a few dollars per month to a Firefox fork. It uses Google's search index, so the results are good, and it has no AI-generated responses. I just want a Firefox fork to be financially sustainable, so I'm paying for it. I don't think it has any advantages over noai.duckduckgo.com, though.

I'll also check https://marginalia-search.com every once in a while, since I like the idea of an independent search engine with their own index. It also has some creative features around discovering small, related websites. Feels like an "early internet" search engine.

I learn a lot while I search. LLMs may or may not hallucinate, and I'm not learning.

Depends how you use LLMs. I didn't say use LLM to solve the problem, I have it breakdown the documentation and make it easier to read/provide examples of usage + explain the steps.

Stackoverflow also has incorrect answers always marked as correct and isn't a great source to learn from, the best way to learn is just reading documentation and having breakpoints to read the data coming in.

I had to make a stackoverflow back in the day to correct so many incorrect answers.

Not a traditional one, but https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/tvZQHU4Dbf. And if it doesn't show the results I want, I use Ecosia.

duck duck go is like firefox for me. I use it currently but im sorta moving away from it. I don't really have a good ddg replacement though.

As much as I hate Microslop, I've been primarily using Bing because of the whole rewards thing they have. Although, I obviously wouldn't recommend using it and instead would recommend DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or OceanHero.

For those who haven't heard of OceanHero, their goal is somewhat similar to Ecosia but they work towards cleaning the Ocean.

Startpage (which is a proxy for bing, but... Yeah)

4get, I self host an instance

Kagi for well over a year now

I think I have it set to only prompt when I click the button, which is the same domain, and still leaves the option

I've been using the HTML only version of DuckDuckGo as my default since Google made JS mandatory to run searches. It works ok for most of the simple queries I make. (e.g. looking something up from the Python docs, MDN, etc.) I resort to Google still for the stuff it completely flubs.

Gone from probably 99% Google + 1% of other to maybe something like 95% DDG + 5% other (mostly Google).

Went from DDG to start page. I’d use kagi if they weren’t frugal with searches.

Quick! Look it up on AltaVista!

DuckDuckGo: good all-around search engine

Searx: when I'm feeling extra FOSS

Kagi: when I need Google from 10-15 years ago. Has a cool "lenses" feature that let's you target the type of sites the results come from. (Kagi is one of those rare moments where I use something proprietary because the more open alternatives can't meet my needs yet.

it's just a search engine bro, i swear the puritans on lemmy omzzzz

Man, I'm just curious. I upvoted your post. Don't know why you're getting angry.

my bad didn't mean to come off as angry

Yeah, shit happens, I get it.

Ecosia mainly, I used to use kagi which I liked but I wasn't sure it was worth the cost although I was thinking about using it again as I really like their small web stuff.

I also used yandex for piracy stuff, I think they ignore all DMCA takedowns or something so it's much easier to find stuff on it

I love being able to flip on the "forums"or "fediverse" scope when I'm looking for opinions or recommendations. It saves me having to scroll through a bunch of resellers, manual reporters, fake review sites, AI listicals, etc.