DeGoogle Yourself

Try www.nogoo.me

You can find a good Searxng instance or run your own (it can also run on a RPi)

• Have you also experienced this worsening of DuckDuckGo?

Yes.

• Which other more privacy-respecting alternatives do you recommend?

I'm in the same boat. I'll be trying out these answers.

I use DDG and can't say I've had an uptick in the amount of !g I have to do. The only one recently was for an image search but that's pretty normal when looking for something obscure.

Don't have any solutions, but figured another input might be interesting.

Searx is good enough if you set up plenty of engines - I do look up quite a lot of stuff and not once in the past 3 months did I go "yeah I need to use google for this".

I mostly use startpage, but occasionally ecosia and mojeek.

you can search through brave or google using mullvads leta:

https://leta.mullvad.net/

For you, I would recommend the following:

• Startpage
• SearXNG
• LibreY
• araa
• Whoogle
• Leta
• Brave Search

I use SearXNG, which I self-host.

The vast majority of the quality comes from the result ranking (that is what people generally refer as indexes albeit indexes are slightly different conceptually). In practice there are two main indexes/ranking (a) Google (b) Bing. DDG, Ecosia, yahoo are, at best, tuning the ranking (not sure if they make things better or worse with that).

This is the reason if you want meaningfully better quality you need searXNG. Because combining results from multiple search engines you grt both main indexes.

There is a ranking/quality problem there as well because how do you join the results of multiple search engines? I think it simply uses a “voting” system where it bumps the results from most search engines. This also means that you want a “balanced” number of search engines based on Google and Bing otherwise you’ll get mainly Google or mainly bing results. Or you may just enable only Google and Bing, really 🤷‍♂️

If there will be new indexes (e.g. the new European one) you may want to enable them as well but this kind of problems take time to become competitive with giants like Google and Bing (albeit with enshittification this gap is being reduced)

Startpage uses Google's results, similar to like DDG uses Bing's, I find to be splendid replacement for spying engine.

i have noticed that i get fewer results from ddg lately, and local (server-side geoip driven) and totally irrelevant shit frequently thrown in starting below the fold on page 1.

but ddg has been my go-to for years. and very rarely do i need to look elsewhere for a different 'perspective'--picking from the others configured in my browser: ecosia, startpage, qwant, mojeek. i have a couple instances of self-hostable meta engines in there too, but those are too unreliable to count on for regular use.

Btw https://mwmbl.org/ is an interesting project, although not usable yet

You can try hosting a searxng instance. If not try some public searxng instances. https://searx.space/

I have been very happy with Kagi. I think that it is worth the money. I did quit it though, in line with the US boycott, so now i am on Quant.

Been using Qwant for about a month. Feels like of like old Google did, very happy.

Only place it’s lacking is image search, but Google has been pretty shite for the past year too.

I've definitely felt the enshittification of DDG. A couple of years ago they would start dropping hits related to my location into my search results, even when I had region off and private search by default. That gave me the impression that my IP address was being used and possibly passed on to Bing, but I don't have the chops to confirm it 🤷

I think in the last few years DDG has been improving and google has been worsening for general searching. Because I have nearly stopped using !g before I used it constantly.

I still use google at work as the results there match a bit better.

Kagi is pretty amazing. You have to pay but the peace of mind is worth it for the respect of your privacy. FastGPT is a phenomenally helpful tool that I use multiple times per day. Kagi.com

I haven't noticed any issues with the quality of DDG results, but if you feel the results are lackluster, you could try a metasearch engine like SearXNG. You can self-host it or use one of the many public instances maintained by the community. The main advantage, apart from the privacy focused aspect of the project, is that you can pull results from multiple search engines with a single query. It's highly customizable too. You can configure it exactly how you want.