Duckduckgo search results in Abrowser
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For some time, using the usual + and - signs and quotation marks in duckduckgo search strings have been failing to make much of a difference. Is there a way to bring efficient search back?
Also, more recently, I have noticed totally unrelated search results linking to local tourist information.
This is making duckduckgoogle look ever more like a broken search engine trying to survive on expedients. I have been trying to use TorBrowser instead, but this only changed the region for the tourist information spam, and of course the search efficiency problem remains.
I happen to be totally outdated:
"Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing" -- https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources. So DDG is in fact currently a front-end to Bing. I feel old and tired.
UPDATE: SearXNG seems to be doing a good job: https://searx.space, and it is possible to add one or more SearXNG instances as search engines on Abrowser. Farewell, DDG.
Also, as of 2022, the DuckDuckGo's Help Pages stipulated that their product is not free - "partly closed source" in their own words: https://web.archive.org/web/20230315103220/https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/community/open-source/. Now, there is a page "Are DuckDuckGo apps and extensions open source?" which stipulates that "many [but not all?] of [their] products and features are available under open source licenses."
I imagine that if DDG was freely distributed there would be instances running (like SearXNG), but maybe I am missing something.
I imagine that if DDG was freely distributed there would be instances running (like SearXNG), but maybe I am missing something.
I think search engines rely on preprocessed data a lot. For example when you search "Trisquel" on DDG, surely it won't search a few billion websites. DDG already knows what "Trisquel" is and which sites have related information about it and that is what I call preprocessed data. If one were about to run a DDG instance, he would need all that preprocessed data which I believe is a massive amount, However, SearXNG is different. It is just a frontend to other search engines.
I advise you do not interact ever with the DDG regular search engine as it relies on nonfree javascript running on your browser to work, use the html version instead:
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html
From what I noticed, I also do not get neither localized nor generic ads on my search results from what I can tell, but I use Ublock Origin and JShell all the time, if you don't then it's time to start now because nonfree business will serve ads your way, like it or not.
DDG may be a "frontend" to Bing but so is SearX to other search engines, a free one at that, for sure. The problem with public SearX instances is that these will often be rate limited if they're widely popular, so hosting your own is preferred.
There's also this:
An interesting project, a fully independent and proper search engine (unlike SearX which is a search engine scrapper/indexer), protected under AGPLv3, worth checking out.
Thank you for clarifying this difference between DDG and SearXNG. I had missed that.
Thanks Prospero for pointing out SearXNG. I tried SearX a long time ago and didn't know that a better maintained fork had been made.
JC8 I agree it is better to use the html version of DDG but unfortunately I don't think the html version works for image searches.
Also when you click on a DDG link it sometimes redirects you thru its own server as described here
https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/73312/are-duckduckgo-redirects-a-privacy-issue
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/14t3y1d/how_to_skip_redirect_links_in_duckduckgo_lite/
https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/u6zfw/why_does_duckduckgo_redirect_my_search_results/?rdt=42352
Not sure why DDG does that, it would certainly be nice if DDG explained why it does this and give an option to disable this behavior! But anyway I think the html site gives you normal links, not the redirect ones.
You are also right that whether you use DDG or SearX(NG) you are still indirectly using other search engines such as Bing. SearX(NG) might give you the option to disable the use of engines like Bing but if you disable all the non-free search engines then you are not going to get useful results! (It will be a historic day when we have a truly free search engine available! I wasn't aware about Marginalia (thanks for pointing that out) but by it's own admision its more suited for niche usage then for typical everyday queries)
Its nice to have the option of SearX(NG) but it seems to me you need to compromise, either you use a popular instance, which will then be rate limited or the proxied "backend" search engines like Google, etc. refuse to return search results, which limit it's usefulness, or you use a less popular instance or self host, in which case you can be more easily tracked and profiled (which is one of the main reasons many people don't want to use Google or Bing directly in the first place.)
I just overall avoid using search engines unless there's a very specific reason to because there's no ideal solution, unless you selfhost your own SearX indexer and you use it privately, in such scenario, you won't get rate limited and it would forward search results just fine.
I bookmark whatever sites I'm interested in, and in some occasions I just can easily remember the links (like for example with this forum), I used to go for search engines to access most sites years ago, but I realized it was a pointless extra step and on top of that, it feeds data to these companies about which sites you visit, that's likely why DDG behaves like that with link redirections.
It is noticeable that duckduckgo now do some censorship:
“Then came the Russian invasion. DuckDuckGo actually took action before most of its conservative fanbase realized it did. A representative of the company told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on March 1 that DuckDuckGo suspended its partnership with Yandex, a Russian search engine. But then Weinberg tweeted that he was sickened by Russia’s actions and that DuckDuckGo was down-ranking Russian disinformation.”
In “The free speech search engine that never was” from vox.com.
Being “sickened by Russia’s actions” is a political opinion and there is no problem with that but “down-ranking Russian disinformation” is a political action of censorship (because it considers by default Russian informations as disinformations while anyone should be able to make his own opinion).
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