Dumping Google search

[Whoozit]

I've finally had enough of overly intrusive ads, irrelevant websites, searches having to be micro-fine tuned to get any signal from the noise. As well as the Google trackers bloody everywhere...

I've been using Duckduckgo for a few days on desktop and mobile. Seems to be better for general search, worse for shopping (no surprise perhaps). I like the results from Alltheinternet when I tested it as part of this post, so perhaps I'll swap between the two.

For the Google-phobes among you, which do you use?

[stevoknevo]

I've been using duckduckgo for years (despite being a Google phone user I try to use as few of their apps as possible...) but all of my use is entirely recreational, I don't need it for work or business.

[thebraketester]

I have tried and yet I always come back to google. I just like the way the results are shown a DuckDuckGo for eg.

[Ham_and_Jam]

Think you need to put - ‘nah I’m sticking with Google’ on your poll.

[boxedin]

If you're running your own server; Google without any of the junk:
https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

[Whoozit]

Ham_and_Jam said:

Think you need to put - ‘nah I’m sticking with Google’ on your poll.

Done

[mercedeslimos]

I find Duckduckgo fine, but it certainly don't do some things well. The shopping thing for one, also doesn't have opening times or contact details for any businesses, etc. And Google seems to group forum results into groups, DDG doesn't so if I'm googling some car issue to see if it's a regular issue, unfortunately Google wins.

[LuS1fer]

Mainly Brave with DDG as a backup.

[ben5575]

Also Brave browser and with Qwant search engine as above. Gives better results than DDG, but will give you the US version of amazon etc which is the trade off for more privacy.

[the-norseman]

I used to use DDG but then Brave became default on Brave Browser, and got to admit Brave isn't great you get half the results and sometimes cant actually find what you are looking for.

[Brother D]

With recent changes and the introduction/injection of their ideology to search results I've been moving over to duck duck go.

[Vsix and Vtec]

I just installed an Adblocker and kept using Google. Ultimately, its still the superior search engine, it just needs a little help calming the adverts down and all is well again.

[lizardbrain]

Until recently 90% of my google use has been replaced with LLMs. Now Gemini can search my docs and return websites it’s more like 95%. Can’t see it being as easy to monetise though

I’m amazed $GOOG hasn’t crashed already.

[richhead]

google just works

[Haltamer]

What happened to the "Don't be evil" clause?

I've been using Ecosia for a while now.

[NaePasaran]

Seeing as this thread is 2 years old, anyone stuck with any alternatives that aren't Google?

Had 6 months with DuckDuckGo, tried Ecosia for 6 months, just about to revert back to Google. Maybe I'm too used to Google, maybe my search queries don't work for the others, but I find the results to be pretty terrible, so I flick open a new Tab, bring down the "G" from the dropdown menu, put in the exact same query and Google finds what I'm after instantly.

I ditched most of Microsoft with relative ease, but cant say the same with Google.

Edited by NaePasaran on Monday 13th July 17:34

[Joseph Ducreux]

Still using DDG for everything but I'm tempted to spin up a VM and put a private Searxng instance on it to aggregate multiple search provider responses locally.

https://github.com/searxng/searxng

https://docs.searxng.org/own-instance.html

[classicaholic]

Still using DDG after this thread, its OK and cuts out a lot of ads and also loads youtube videos without all the ads.

[gregch]

Haltamer said:

What happened to the "Don't be evil" clause?

I've been using Ecosia for a while now.

+1 for Ecosia.

[FlossyThePig]

I've been using Startpage for quite some time now.

It works for me.