I don't know wether or not it works as good in the US but startpage.de (also avaliable in .com flavour) has been tolerable for me.
Still regular Google seems to be better in many cases.

Better how? Google finds stuff for you (amidst all thr unrelated garbage) that startpage doesn't? I guess that's the obvious answer. But again I just can't see the logic in it all. Totally inexplicable as far as I can see.

I'm using Bing for the time being. Don't laugh. But I'll look at startpage.

Same experience.

No matter how much I want to support DuckDuckGo on principle, I keep coming back to Google, becomes it is simply leaps and bounds ahead when it comes to the fundamental goal of a search engine - finding relevant results.

No, I'm sorry I have to vehemently disagree. My intent was not simply to bash ddg. ALL search engines seem to do this. Respectfully, there's no "going back to goolog" as far as I'm concerned. People don't leave goolog for ddg because they automatically believe they'll get an overall better experience, but on account of legitimate privacy concerns. People are sickened by goolog's collusion with the red chinese, sickened by their tampering with data to sway the.outcome of elections. Sick of big tech in general.

For what it's worth I was on my way to finding what I went to ddg to find. Any search engine will largely get you where you need to be. Some may be better then others. But they ALL seemingly do the same nonsense.

I am sorry buy you entirely missed the point.

"don't be evil"

chris2021 wrote on 2022-03-27, 06:00:

Better how? Google finds stuff for you (amidst all thr unrelated garbage) that startpage doesn't? I guess that's the obvious answer. But again I just can't see the logic in it all. Totally inexplicable as far as I can see.

I'm using Bing for the time being. Don't laugh. But I'll look at startpage.

Better as in the information I'm looking for is more frequently within the first ten results.
Startpage uses Google's search results though. It just anonymises them.

I remember quite a few years ago I caught some adware and that adware changed my home page to Startpage. Definitely put me off of ever legit using it.

chris2021 wrote on 2022-03-27, 06:52:

I am sorry buy you entirely missed the point.

Never mind, I think I understand better now. You're actually complaining that it served you one irrelevant result amidst relevant results? That does seem a bit like a "first world problem" to me.

Maybe some people misspell the name, and were actually looking for Watertown and typed Waretown. So that page went up the ranks. Who knows?

P.S. Sorry I misunderstood your point from the get go. Perhaps the thread title "duck duck go is worse then google!!!" misled me a bit. 😉

I don't think much and keep using Google. Perhaps they will store, save and sell my data, but that's what is happening to millions of people, perhaps even famous people as well. But Google is convenient

I've grown to despise Google as a company, and I want to support competition to knock them off their powerful perch.
So I use DuckDuckGo by default, but if the results suck, then I'll use Google as a fallback. DDG always gets the first crack though.
I vaguely remember StartPage, I should look at it again.

@Dr_ST. I'm going to use your replies as the "perfect ullustration" of what I'm talking about. Please don't be offended, despite the degree to which your ears may burn. Let's stay friends.

"I think I understand better now."

Lol you mean you actually read the post, after initially only doing a cursory scan of the title. And blathered out a bunch of hooie 🤣 🤣. Wow, sounds just like Goolog/Fling/ShmuckeyaGoGo. They do that too.

"You're actually complaining that it served you one irrelevant result amidst relevant results? That does seem a bit like a "first world problem" to me."

...and snark to boot. Dare and write in a complaint, as if there was a complaint dep't, and that's what you'll get. After all gi -go. Don't you dare complain about our precious algorithms, you li'l first world pion.

1 lone irrelevant result, among 7. Besides the fact that there are 10s of millions to follow. It's piss poor programming. Sometimes 1 is 1 too many.

"Maybe some people misspell the name, and were actually looking for Watertown and typed Waretown. So that page went up the ranks. Who knows?"

Someone ought to know. And believe you me Skynet does 😉.

I'm sure peiple mistype stuff into search engines all the time. That is not a justification for some idiot "first world" ai to spit out results pertaining to every possible mispelling of a search term. If I see a bunch of irrelevant results, I may get the impressiion I was the one that did something wrong. But alas I did everything right. And still wound up with poppycock.

"P.S. Sorry I misunderstood your point from the get go. Perhaps the thread title "duck duck go is worse then google!!!" misled me a bit. 😉"

Did I call it right? Hey don't get me wrong, we all have done it. But at some point it really has to stop. Otherwise we risk being seen as irrelevant.

DuckDuckGo works like an anonymizer for Bing. Startpage.com works like an anonymizer for Google. Other options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Dogpile was a thing some ways back. I never even hear it mentioned no mo.

chris2021 wrote on 2022-03-27, 12:27:

Lol you mean you actually read the post, after initially only doing a cursory scan of the title.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. I have no problem admitting that. 😀 We all sometimes skim, especially when reading fast in the middle of other things, and then we may miss the point. Let's just say that it does not help when the post in question is written like a rant which tends to jump from topic to topic. 🤷

chris2021 wrote on 2022-03-27, 12:27:

Someone ought to know. And believe you me Skynet does 😉.

Maybe you should ask the authors of the search engine algorithms, then? I don't think any of them are on this forum. And even if they lurk here, it is probably not the best way to reach them. 😉

chris2021 wrote on 2022-03-27, 12:27:

If I see a bunch of irrelevant results, I may get the impressiion I was the one that did something wrong.

Was it 1 irrelevant out of 7, followed by more relevant results, or is it that every result after the first 7 was irrelevant? The former can be a "glitch in the matrix". The latter may mean they are just not too many relevant results.

dr_st wrote on 2022-03-27, 12:49:

chris2021 wrote on 2022-03-27, 12:27:

If I see a bunch of irrelevant results, I may get the impressiion I was the one that did something wrong.

Was it 1 irrelevant out of 7, followed by more relevant results, or is it that every result after the first 7 was irrelevant? The former can be a "glitch in the matrix". The latter may mean they are just not too many relevant results.

This is the only point I'll reply to as I don't want to reiterate myself in 50 trillion ways until the end of time.

If there are only so many relevant results, and I'm sure we've all seen examples of an engine yielding only a page or 2 of results, why not just leave it at that? Instead of causing my head to ache on account of sifting through irrelevant crap.

chris2021 wrote on 2022-03-27, 12:56:

If there are only so many relevant results, and I'm sure we've all seen examples of an engine yielding only a page or 2 of results, why not just leave it at that?

Maybe you should ask the authors of the search engine algorithms, then? I don't think any of them are on this forum. And even if they lurk here, it is probably not the best way to reach them. 😉

Good luck.

DDG is NOT actually protecting your privacy, it's a bunch of BS they are just as bad as any other tech company

I would not be surprtised.

But then again, anything is better then Goolog.

They all stink. Many times it seems to be a flip of the coin whether you'll get a bunch of irrelevant results for something that contains a related word, or get no results at all. I'll put English search terms into DDG and get Russian results. I'll put Russian search terms into Startpage and get English results. It is apparently not possible to put Japanese search terms into youdoob and NOT get Chinese results (put as many kana as you want, it doesn't care). And then there's the SEO spam. Giant keyword blobs. Copypasta. GPT-3?

Dogpile is still around though and can be helpful at times.