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DuckDuckGo starting to give more "personal" search results

Been slowly running into more results from DDG that seem to have some “personal parameter” or difference in search results. I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see that the searches aren’t 100% matching up either.

I see this as only getting worse, I want to be able to enter a search and it searches for my query. Not based on my personality or whatever info is being collected. Does anyone know a search engine that’s reliable and focuses on giving the same results and doesn’t try this “personalized” crap?

cheese_greater ,

Is there a way to get reminded when there’s more replies?

TWeaK ,

Not that I’m aware of. Your best bet is to save the post and come back later, or if you’re in a browser leave the tab open in the background.

LarkinDePark ,

Not really. Just use the bookmark the page function and go through your bookmarks later.

dohpaz42 ,
@dohpaz42@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve noticed this too. Not only what you stated, but how the search terms aren’t always respected; ie they do similar terms, even if the term or phrase is in quotes (the quotes should mean exact matches only). They also do a lot of filtering of the results if they feel I shouldn’t be seeing them. I can take my same search query from DDG to Google and most of the time find what I’m looking for.

If I understand DDG correctly, they use Microsoft Bing as their backend for search results. So while they may be branded DDG, the results are in fact out of DDG’a control. It also means we are more subject to Microsoft’s privacy policy than we are to DDG’s.

I’ve been wanting to move away from DDG because of these reasons, but have been unable to find good alternatives. Hopefully someone here can make good suggestions.

acosmichippo , (edited )
@acosmichippo@lemmy.world avatar

DDG uses a bunch of different sources, it’s not just rebranded bing.

also DDG does not send any personal info to its partners, so Microsoft’s privacy policy is not relevant.

OP’s concern is that DDG itself is keeping your personal info and using that to weigh your search results. But that also directly contradicts DDG’s privacy policy, so it’s either a major breach of trust or I think more likely OP is reading into varying search results too much.

TWeaK , (edited )

The page you link to talks about the search results that come at the top of the page, eg a Wikipedia or Trip Advisor result. The actual search itself comes from Bing, and it’s more than likely that the top page banner also is processed via Bing.

Edit: However, the Wikipedia page does provide more detail, which proves you right and my assumption wrong:

DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.

TWeaK , (edited )

If I understand DDG correctly, they use Microsoft Bing as their backend for search results. So while they may be branded DDG, the results are in fact out of DDG’a control. It also means we are more subject to Microsoft’s privacy policy than we are to DDG’s.

This is exactly right. DDG is basically a front end that’s supposed to strip out identifying information and then submit your request to Microsoft. [Edit:] Apparently they have expanded from this, according to their Wikipedia page. [/E]

However, after seeing TV ads for DDG not that long ago I kind of lost what faith I had left in them. As a rule of thumb, I’ve never trusted products and services advertised on TV - TV advertising is expensive, and the business expects to make that expense back and then some from their customers.

acosmichippo , (edited )
@acosmichippo@lemmy.world avatar

However, after seeing TV ads for DDG not that long ago I kind of lost what faith I had left in them. As a rule of thumb, I’ve never trusted products and services advertised on TV - TV advertising is expensive, and the business expects to make that expense back and then some from their customers.

DDG doesn’t claim to be non-profit or anything. Their business model is based on revenue from advertising targeted solely from the search queries themselves, not from stored personal data.

someguy3 ,

Ugh. I use DDG for the privacy, because it sure as fuck isn’t a good search engine.

bruce965 ,
@bruce965@lemmy.ml avatar

I use DDG for the privacy as well, but personally I think it works better than Google in my field (software development). The only issue I personally have with DDG is that it lags behind Google in terms of updates, I notice when searching for something that came out or happened only recently.

doctortran ,

There aren’t any good search engines anymore, because there isn’t a good internet anymore. SOE has buried the internet’s wealth of information and centralization starved out all the spaces where information used to be. Hell half the forums that used to appear in search results aren’t even online anymore, and live only in the way back machine (which doesn’t come up in results).

There’s so little to find anymore compared to the halcyon days of search engines we remember.

someguy3 ,

I do turn to google after failing at DDG and the results are better.

pelespirit ,
@pelespirit@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’ve been noticing that they’ve been getting worse and worse myself. I was recommenced Mojeek and Qwant, but I haven’t made the switch yet. I always forget to use them instead.

TWeaK ,

DuckDuckGo is also feeding your search terms into AI development now. I’ve tried it again recently but prefer Ecosia, at least Ecosia lets me more easily get to Google Maps when I want to, rather than trying to push Apple Maps.

taaz ,

I just usually do !map

TWeaK ,

Ah I wasn’t aware of that shortcut, one of the main reasons DDG wasn’t working for me was because I thought I could only do !g and then go to the Google page, and Google had been making it more difficult to go from the main search page to Maps.

ZeroCool ,

I had been using DDG for years but switched to SearXNG last fall after reading about it on Lemmy. It’s a privacy focused meta-search engine that can even be self-hosted. It’s wildly customizable and I’ve been pretty happy with the results.

If you’re not interested in self-hosting, or just want to test drive it a bit, there are lots of public instances you can use as well.

github.com/searxng/searxng

List of public instances

nul9o9 ,

I’ve switched to searx as well.

I added an instance as a custom search on my firefox mobile app using this string. https://ooglester.com/search?q=%s

d00ery ,

I’m clearly not understanding something here, but I thought search engines would require loads of space to index all the internet. Just thinking about the ability to search for code on stackoverflow seems like loads already.

Edit:

Found it!

SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.

Looks very interesting, thanks for commenting about it.

acosmichippo , (edited )
@acosmichippo@lemmy.world avatar

This would be a major issue, because DDG specifically claims it does not store any identifying information about you.

duckduckgo.com/privacy

I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see that the searches aren’t 100% matching up either.

my guess is this is just variation in the search algorithms over time. excerpt from their privacy policy above which I think can explain most of the variability you mentioned:

“For example, we may know that we got a lot of searches for “cute cat pictures” today, but we don’t know who actually performed those searches. That is, viewing search results on DuckDuckGo is anonymous. And we only save these anonymous search queries — completely disconnected from any unique identifiers like IP addresses — for just enough time to analyze anonymous trends like popular searches, so that we can better serve you. For local search results in particular, we’ve further engineered a solution to shield your precise location from us and our content providers that sends us a random location nearish to you, which we also never log to disk.”

So they do use your geo IP and popular searches to weigh results which can change over time.

50MYT ,

Yep.

For the simple response - they group all the searches from your location based on IP, and the results are weighted from that.

So if your town has a airshow on, all the DDG users that search for airshow near you will bump those responses up the weighting scale for all uses in your area. Regardless of you search for it.

seeg ,
@seeg@toot.whatever.cz avatar

@Cataphract Nowadays I just prefer to pay for search to

bizarroland ,

Startpage has been my go to for a while. Between it and ecosia I can usually find what I'm looking for

TylerDurdenJunior ,

Well. Isn’t ddg just a Bing API?

Mojeek ,
@Mojeek@lemmy.ml avatar

pretty much: www.searchenginemap.com, used to be +the Yandex API

BrightCandle ,

I noticed today searching that the date search no longer seems to work right. There are some terms that only appeared since 2020 and up until my recent attempts those terms produced no results on DDG when date constrained but now produce terms in articles clearly after that date. I don’t know if this is some personalisation nonsense or always pulling but results if the constraints don’t match or what but its seriously problematic and means I can’t trust the date constraints anymore.

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