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I'm just trying to search for a website...
(thelemmy.club)
Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of "AI" stuff, but come on, one of these isn't even in English, and that's what I have my language set to.
yup, literally just use a good seatch engine and you'll find everything you need (idek what OP is using is that startpage?)
OP is using SearxNG, an Open-Source, Self Host able metasearch engine which is not going to work well unless you set your own settings correctly and tailor them to how you use the web. StartPage is just proxied google results. SearxNG can proxy StartPage, but these results are from Bing.
Yeah I didn't realize my settings weren't configured right, so I did so, came back today and found they were switched back! That's why I was struggling. I have SearxNG in my whitelist for cookies too, so no idea why that's happening. With the settings changed, it works great!
How's Qwant in terms of search results and privacy/AI?
I've been using startpage (it's an improvement over Mojeek, that was kinda unusable).
Mojeek has improved a lot in last times. Is a good alternative, but always good to use several search engines for different tasks, all they have its + and -, eg Startpage is good for image search, Andi is fine for semantic and concept searches with excelent summaries, Mojeek and Qwant for general websearch, etc.- In the Vivaldi forum you can find the, maybe, most complete list of search engines out there which you can test (all include the needed insert code to add these direct to the list in your browser - 19 page thread)
search results: they used to suck when i tried using qwant a year ago, but now theyre the exact same as on ecosia and google from my experience
privacy: this is what they say on their website
AI: havent spotted any ai featurea yet
I'm a bit distrustful of the current french political scene and macron's involvement in their phasing out of American tech (which is in principle good but it's the actors here that are sus).
I know. I'm trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.
The
noai.duckduckgo.comURL is important to notice in the screenshot.That's my take as well. You can also remove AI results from Google by adding the &udm=14 string to force web results only, but it doesn't absolve them of blame for how much they push AI. DDG deserves equal criticism.
It's like old Reddit. Sure it still exists, but it only gets worse and worse as they double down on the version everyone hates until the majority don't even know there's another option. And there's no guarantee they keep supporting the option that makes them less money.
Possibly, though as another commenter mentioned, using the noai URL for the moment is a good way to voice discontent. Not using it just falls into the "everyone uses google" narrative in a different way.
https://voteyesornoai.com/
If DDG's own poll didn't spell that out for them, I don't think they care.
Yeah, fair point. I wish DDG were going in a different direction.
Well that's interesting as a poll result. ๐
The article behind the link at the bottom of the site shows that this is a marketing stunt
the poll numbers are still ๐
Yeah, that's why I'm getting away from them. Thankfully the issue I was having seems to be a config issue and not a problem with SearxNG.
You really do either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
SearXNG is a mixed bag to be honest...I find that Ononoki's SearXNG delivers decent results...It's a bit mixed at times with PieFed being the third option. Some topics are surfaced better than others, so your mileage will vary with SearXNG.
Using the No AI version of DuckDuckGo sends them a message that their bet on "AI" isn't going to win them any accolades. It's an easy way to push back. As they are tracking those metrics and people can see the numbers of how many users disapprove of AI.
Bing and yahoo are VERY bad, it seems they detect that they are being used through proxies, I made another comment for what i use in searxng.
DDG's backend is really just Bing, though ...
They give different results, it seems they have different treatment to the data, which is interesting. Startpage gives different results than google, duckduckgo gives different results than bing, but on the bigger picture, a bigger sample gives the statistically optimal result??? (closer to the source truth on the most probable good result) question mark, huge number theory on statistics.
(i'm drunk)
Bing in a sandboxed session yielded results identical to DDG in my experiments.
In searxng they don't give the same results, bing brings some completely different stuff both on an selfhosted instance and on an public instance (it just gives random garbage), it seems proxying does some stuff to bings internal algorithm, as google is different than startpage on searxng.
Edit: a screenshot showing it.
Given the same methodology (search algorithm) a larger sample size gives a truer picture of what that methodology favors. If the methodology isn't neutral or doesn't bias in the same way as your desired outcome then a smaller sample size analyzed by a different methodology may provide better results.
Ah shit, I forgot to turn both those off. Ugh, I've been playing browser shuffle...Good catch!
What search engine?
It's just Bing wearing a duck hat anyway
That's because this is an ad for PieFed.
lol no I just didn't realize I had my stuff configured wrong. But I was searching for Piefed with the intent to join bc Lemmy's devs suck and yeah, shit's good. So if you want, you can consider this reply an ad for Piefed, tho it's actually a neutral endorsement :3
Lol, just did the same thing.