Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

26 points by ldng 3 hours ago | 47 comments

More than 10 years ago I dropped Google Search because my searches were enshitified and bubble wrapped and quotes stop to matter so it became impossible to escape the bubble.

As the saying goes, it happened before and will happen again : it now the turn of DuckDuckGo to enshitify my searches by bubblification and ignoring quotes.

Also, not interested in IA chatbot, I prefer multiple sources and to cross-check the information myself, thank you.

What alternatives are you using / recommending ?

SyneRyder 1 hour ago |

If you don't mind paying and someone else having control over your search experience, Kagi is an option. Urkey (sp?) is another new alternative.

If you just want a free search engine, Brave is probably the best index. Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface.

But if you want to go down the rabbit hole, it's easy to build your own metasearch engine and search several engines at once - an AI model can make one for you in a single night with just a small PHP script, if you have your own website / webost. In my case, the combination of Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia covers all my search needs.

Deeper down the rabbit hole, you can build your own search index with SQLite, as an additional index for your metasearch. There are projects like Hister that will help make your own search index:

https://hister.org/

worldsavior 2 hours ago |

You can use noai.duckduckgo.com if don't want AI, and lite.duckduckgo.com if you don't want bubblification.

ldng 33 minutes ago | |

Because I don't trust them anymore ?

sphars 1 hour ago | |

I just added this as a search engine in Firefox, thanks for the heads-up. For reference, I added this URL:

  https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s&noai

dijksterhuis 1 hour ago | |

didn't know about lite, thanks for the tip

kstrauser 2 hours ago |

I gladly pay for Kagi because the experience is so much better that it’s worth it to me.

abtinf 1 hour ago | |

The value of Kagi is hard to overstate. You have to actually use it and try out the features.

Some things that I wish were different about Kagi:

I wish Kagi Ultimate LLM credits could be shared with the whole family, rather than each person having to sign up for an ultimate level account. That costs an additional $162/year per person, which makes no sense for my younger kids (even though their Research Agent and image generation would be great for my kids). This is actually the reason I’ve been hesitant to setup a family plan at all.

I wish I could use Kagi LLM routing as a generic LLM provider outside of Kagi Assistant. (I don’t really care that they charge ~4x the markup of openrouter; I just want one place to pay the bill and that it includes search is nice).

Alternatively, I wish Kagi would support BYOK.

I wish Kagi API search would simply draw down from the same bucket as LLM credits. I really don’t understand why they are splitting it up like this. I just want to give my local LLM harness a search tool hooked up to my $270/year account.

I wish clicking on the top left Kagi logo on Kagi News would just go back to the Kagi home page.

I wish Gmail hadn’t routed Kagi emails to junk, because I missed the Kagi early adopter free tshirt.

I wish Kagi would implement an Apple TV video app that I could use in place of the abomination that is YouTube.

I wish there were guides in Kagi help or the feature pages themselves that included lots of community examples of how to actually use Kagi features. Like I want the Kagi Redirect Rules for more than just routing Reddit to old Reddit.

There is a lot more. But I think this list is a ringing endorsement of Kagi. Objections betray interest. I use it constantly and can’t wait for it to get better.

colinhb 2 hours ago | |

Rather than make another top-level comment, adding here that Kagi is a better experience for me than Google or DDG. Not perfect, and I wish they would lean even harder into pure search (they're also developing AI features), but still an improvement over alternatives.

mrtomservo 1 hour ago | |

I've been a Kagi user since 2022, and a paying user since January 2024, and I can say that I have not thought about another search engine in as much time. Absolutely worth the $10 per month.

Using a browser that defaults to another search engine is jarring. I see screenshots of what Google search results look like now, and it's like seeing the neighborhood you grew up in with shuttered storefronts and mouldering houses.

Arubis 2 hours ago | |

Kagi has so completely replaced other search engines for me that their appearance in other people’s browsers is disconcerting.

mtlynch 1 hour ago | |

Also a happy Kagi user since 2023, and full disclosure: I participated in their crowdfund, so I have some financial stake in the company that I don't really understand.

I'm always surprised when I see people say, "I can't imagine paying for a search engine."

Imagine if you lived in a city with horrible air pollution, and you were coughing all the time and coming down with mysterious respiratory illnesses. And then you go to a friend's house in the same city who's happy and healthy, and it turns out they have an air filter they pay $10/mo for. And your reaction is, "I can't imagine paying $10/mo just to breathe air."

Pay for search! Get out of the ad-optimized Google black hole. This is a tool you use hundreds of times per month and it fundamentally influences the way you experience the web. It's something that should be a no-brainer to pay for even if it was only marginally better than Google, but I've found it significantly better than Google in most dimensions.

chinggis 1 hour ago | |

Not only is kagi private, but it is also genuinely a much better experience than Google or DDG. However, Brave Search is great if you want something free.

teroshan 1 hour ago | |

I'll expand on a few reasons why I personally love Kagi:

- Ability to block/lower/raise/pin domains. Some examples of commonly tuned domains are here https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights

- Shared custom bangs across my sessions. I can add work-specific bangs (e.g. !bug -> Jira search) and have them available across my devices.

- Regexp redirects, to automatically redirect online documentation results of some libraries to the specific out-of-date library we use in a legacy project.

All of these are not as important as knowing there is no incentive for the search engine to enshittify the results to bump some sponsored product in the results, to raise ad-heavy websites to the front to get back some precious ad revenue due to a conflict of interests, and to lower the quality of results in the hopes of making me search a second time so I am served a second batch of sponsored links.

bayindirh 1 hour ago | |

I'll also pile-in and say that Kagi is great.

dinkblam 1 hour ago | |

been on Kagi 2 years, super happy - haven't googled at all for like a year.

drcongo 1 hour ago | |

Kagi is the best search experience ever. The only reason I started using it in the first place was because DDG started ignoring my quotes. Never looked back.

gtfiorentino 1 hour ago |

Hi, I work on Search at DuckDuckGo. Can you clarify what you mean by “bubblification”? Would be interested to know what has changed for you as a long-time user.

slig 1 hour ago |

https://search.brave.com/

Feels like Google Search from 2008.

grepex 1 hour ago | |

So many people sleep on Brave search. I agree, it's like Google from 08. It just searches for what you ask for. You can disable AI overviews. It's quick. Has a nice UI. It's free lol

cachius 1 hour ago | |

The name collision with the browser is a bit unfortunate. If you set it to default search engine in Chrome on mobile, 'Search with Brave' is very ambiguous!

Finnucane 1 hour ago | | |

It's the same company isn't it? So they share the unfortunateness.

esseph 1 hour ago | | |

Same company

Nicholas_C 1 hour ago | |

Wow it really does. Thanks for sharing.

mlok 1 hour ago |

Why not simply go to DDG settings and disable AI if you dislike it ? (There they will also tell you about https://noai.duckduckgo.com )

ldng 3 minutes ago | |

You're reading that incorrectly. I disapprove of the bubble effect.

I specified I'm not interested in chabot because I'm looking for a search engine and some people tend to conflate the two. I prefer first hand information, hopefully filtered for spam and slop but not "tailored" by a bubble that is more often mistaken than not.

erelong 1 hour ago |

https://search.brave.com

other things that came up in a search not mentioned in post yet (that I have heard of before):

mojeek or yacy - are these any good?

list of searx instances (I've used some of these a while ago but not recently so idk of their quality currently): https://searx.space/

spottedmarley 2 hours ago |

I have roughly the same path as you through default search engines over the years and recently left duckduckgo for ecosia. It's the best alternative I've found and after about a week or two it became second nature just like the ones that came before it. If I don't find what I'm looking for I may still jump over to Google (via incognito window)

p.s ecosia does have their annoying obligatory ai chat bot that attempts to answer things which i could do without but i just mostly ignore it

traceroute66 1 hour ago |

Ecosia and Qwant have just started collaborating on EUSP (European Search Perspective)[1]

This could easily yield very interesting (i.e. "not just another bing proxy") results once it starts gaining traction.

I use DuckDuckGo at the moment, only because Startpage started making themselves impossible to use when they started aggressively blocking access via VPNs. As other people have already said,see `noai.duckduckgo.com` and `lite.duckduckgo.com` which might address your specific concerns.

If you are a Mullvad user, there is also Mullvad Leta[2], which has been security audited[3].

I might shift more towards Ecosia/Qwant.

[1] https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp-germany-rollout/ [2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/introducing-mullvad-leta-a-searc... [3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/16/security-audit-of-our-...

godshatter 37 minutes ago | |

Leta told me it was shutting down months ago. leta.mullvad.net doesn't exist anymore. I'm sad, because it was a great search engine I could trust.

traceroute66 16 minutes ago | | |

Oh, you're right https://mullvad.net/en/blog/shutting-down-our-search-proxy-l...

That's so sad. :(

ldng 1 hour ago | |

Interesting. I'll give Ecosia/Qwant a go than as I'm not really interested in opting-out of a bubble.

Edit: hum, sadly, Qwant integration to Firefox seems to be broken at the moment.

cyanregiment 2 hours ago |

We need it - I’d use 3 search engines. It’s not like MMOs or social media where 1 winner takes all. I think people want more search options, cloud, email, and so-on.

I once tried to index the web with local Mistral 7b. Here’s what I did:

1. Copy/pasted an English dictionary and removed the definitions, so I just had an Array of about 500k words.

2. Wrote a simple loop to iterate over the words, with the instruction to Mistral to try to guess 10 URLs related to that word. I would typically get 2-3 sites per word.

3. When visiting a site, also check that site for links to other URLs, and summarize it with hash tags, visiting the new sites as well and recursively doing that.

4. Keep a tally of how many sites are being linked to for the page’s “rank”.

In the end you should have a massive list of objects with valid URLs ranked by how popular they are (to each other, by link), and a set of searchable hash tags for each.

I ran this for days and I never got past B, and almost every site was adult content. Most of the sites came from other sites. But it does work! Janky page crawling and ranking.

Anyway more people should take on web search, I agree. LLMs offer shortcuts.

dml2135 1 hour ago |

I have not used it yet, but this project looks interesting to me: https://docs.searxng.org/

whitefang 2 hours ago |

Does brave search make any sense for you?

philipov 2 hours ago |

What is bubblification?

sakarrakas 2 hours ago | |

I think it's when the search engine starts answering with links "tailored" by your usage, effectively trapping you into a bubble. But I also never heard the "bubbling" verb.

ldng 1 hour ago | | |

Exactly. I don't like search engine second-guessing what I'm looking for, more often than not it's a miss.

bejd 1 hour ago | | |

Exactly. DuckDuckGo used to advertise themselves as a way to escape Google's search bubble[0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140720050529/http://dontbubble...

eth0up 2 hours ago | |

Aside from a gratifying term, perhaps the absence of thumbnails, icons, or whatever you call those favicon buggers that distract from the important part of the search results?

eth0up 1 hour ago | | |

I see this comment has made someone angry, but it may be the most plausible answer anyway. DuckDuckGo over-affiliates results with user-IPs, which is why I often don't use it. Not because of 'privacy', but because when I search for a specific subject, 99% percent of the time, I do not want localized results, eg when I search how to replace a valve on my vehicle, I am searching for instructions, not local mechanics, which comprises a significant portion of results I get from ddg, along with a few hotels, and restaurants which have nothing to do with my objective.

But I am not sure the comment is being downvoted for irrelevance or any other rational purpose.And ddg is not going to disable the IP bubbling for the lite version

Furthermore, I think we need a modified Godwin's law, to describe the inevitability of any discussion on HN regarding search engines to eventually turn into an ad for Kagi. Not saying it's a bad thing, but I think most people are not ready for a paid search engine.

But at least no one is saying "just use AI". That would be bad.

dmazin 1 hour ago |

This feels like a solved problem entirely: Kagi. I don’t know their secret sauce but the results are very high quality.

bronlund 1 hour ago |

Just use Kagi. Not only is it way better, but you are also not the product.

dartharva 1 hour ago |

Non-AI Google Search.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

ldng 28 minutes ago | |

It's the bubble I have the most issue with. Second-guessing is annoying. This month is getting worst with unasked for auto-correct that, of course, is wrong and end up not allowing me to search exactly what I want because DDG supposedly "know better". It does not.

santiagobasulto 1 hour ago |

I love Google's and duck duck go AI suggestions. Am I crazy? I feel like 90% of the time they answer my question right there.

It will definitively be a problem in the long term for monetization of the authors. But for me as a user, it's the best.

dfxm12 1 hour ago | |

For me, most of the time they don't and instead tell me something I already know or make some assertion with no attribution. Pre-AI, I usually found my answer among the first few results anyway, most often the first. I find searching hard in general in a post AI world since almost all of the first few pages of results are either AI blog spam or links to shopping websites. The signal to noise ratio has just gotten untenably poor.

axegon_ 1 hour ago |

Annoyingly search was at large solved just a few years ago and sadly someone has to reinvent the wheel soon. Lately I've completely switched to ecosia. It gives really decent results for the time being, hoping it'd improve with their co-op with qwant. I also run searxng behind a tor proxy and while it does a pretty solid job overall, it still relies entirely on other search engines so it's not a question of "if" but "when" will it degrade massively.

As for Kagi - they've earned a life-long ban from me for political reasons.

tunapizza 1 hour ago |

Another happy Kagi subscriber here. It's been 1.5 years now, and I've never looked back.

supersparrow 1 hour ago |

Another vote for Kagi from me. Been using it for 3 years now and not looked back. When you accidentally use Google to search, or use a browser with defaults, you will notice really how crap Google/Bing are!