[–] mostlyfriendly 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Honest question: Are you dumping on DDG for being bad at search or for not being really anonymous? If the 2nd point, do you care to elaborate?
[–] anonnynonny 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
I don't necessarily agree, but this post presents an argument.
Additionally, they pull results from yahoo/bing/etc, which mean it is heavily reliant on third party algorithms which can manipulate results.
FWIW, I mainly use DDG myself, but searx, being open-source, is a more interesting alternative in my opinion.
Any server->client search engine inherently has the problem of blind trust... You have to blindly trust that they are doing what they say they are doing (or not doing) - verification is highly difficult, if not impossible.
YaCy potentially solves that issue, since it's p2p... but from what I understand it has a long way to go before it's really a viable alternative.
[–] 8471127? 1 point 2 points 3 points (+3|-1) ago
I don't understand how Google had better search algorithms 15 years ago than DDG has now. I try switching every year or so, but goddamn their search just sucks. It shits the bed if you give it a query that requires even mild parsing and grouping of terms. God help you if you're looking for information that isn't common knowledge or is a deep query into an API, SDK, or aspect of an engineering discipline.
[–] 8471253? 1 point 3 points 4 points (+4|-1) ago
They're definitely worse, especially for any news or history-based search where they bias the results to an extreme degree. No, I don't care about what some celebrity or propaganda site said about this news item, I care about an accurate historical record of events.
[–] anonnynonny 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Searx is an open-source search engine. searx.me is one implementation of it.
Depending on your level of paranoia, trusting an individual implementation of searx may not be acceptible, but that inherent trust is applicable to ANY server-hosted service.
IMO Searx is the closest thing we have to a "working, anonymous substitution" at this point in time.