Comment by lucideer
3 months ago
> I'm solely relying on DuckDuckGo
I've been fully on DDG for years but becoming slowly skeptical & looking for alternatives.
1. They're leaning heavily into "responsible AI", much like Mozilla
2. Might be just me but I feel like their algorithm became significantly worse recently. Over the years they've gone from being worse than Google in the early days to steadily improving & overtaking Google on quality (I made heavy use of !g until I started slowly realising it was no longer giving me better results). But now I feel like they've reversed & regressed again.
https://startpage.com is a Google proxy instead of a Bing proxy (like DDG).
Pretty sure startpage sold out years ago...
For now you can still try noai.duckduckgo.com - not sure it will stay, but it still works.
This is great to avoid ai but doesn't solve the index quality decline.
(though it might be a case of there simply being no good search anymore)