I’ve been using duckduckgo for years now with no issues, but today I opened it and realized there were no longer any search results before scrolling. It was all ads/info cards. So I guess I’m looking for a replacement. Any suggestions?
Related: anyone know if there’s a way in the Adnauseum Firefox extension to hide ads on a specific trusted site? I like their goal of not punishing ads following the do not track standard, but DDG has crossed a threshold and I now want to blacklist them specifically.
I’m partial to ecosia.org myself. Search while helping to plant more trees!
I do wonder how they get the money to plant these trees, hmm…
edit: oh, look at that! Even ecosia started getting into AI. Truly impossible for search engines not to get into AI territory these days, funny right? Even kagi did.
Not doubting you here, but I just tried searching for two very different terms on DDG on two different devices (Windows laptop and Android phone) and two different browsers (Firefox and Brave), and I didn’t really see any ads or dodgy stuff.
The mobile Firefox version had a couple of main links at the top (they don’t look like ads), and some news cards under that. But the links were all relevant. The desktop DDG was super clean, again no ads.
This was without ad blockers enabled too. I also tried it in private mode, and still clean.
What am I missing? Why is my DDG experience so clean compared to yours?
I second this. DDG, Searxng and various LLM are my daily drivers depending on the queries. I don’t recognise DDG being bloated with ads like Google. I have adblockers but I put sites like DDG on the whitelist because hey support the good guys.
Is it topical? Regional? Does OP have malware that is transforming the browser document? Is OP searching for niche content and confusing singular domain results for ads? Has DDG shifted owners and doing some tests?
I would like to know more.
DDG is not any better than bing. If you are willing to give your data to the “good guys” so they can make money with your data, you ultimately failed at protecting your privacy.
Check out Kagi. It’s a paid search engine. I’ve been using it almost half a year now and really enjoy it.
What about it is worth paying for?
Kagi is simply SearXNG backend with a pretty UI. Nothing it provides is unique or something you cannot get elsewhere for free and most times better.
It literally uses Bing and Google indexes and is functionally no different than DDG except for the ability for you to pay them money to quality control the search results for them, which is extremely dumb because they are essentially making you pay them for you to do a job for them.
Avoid it unless you have money to waste for aesthetics like Apple fanatics.
