Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?

42 pointsldng94 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 ?

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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/

> Urkey (sp?) is another new alternative.

What's the URL?

Finally found it! It's called Uruky:

https://uruky.com/

It's a small European Kagi competitor trying to get started, the creator sometimes posts here on HN. The name is really not memorable - I think it's meant to be pronounced like "Euro-key".

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

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

didn't know about lite, thanks for the tip

Because I don't trust them anymore ?

Are you asking us or are you telling us?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I’ve been on Kagi for 2 years and just learned about this. I really, really need to sit down and RTFM.

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.

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.

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.

Another vote for Kagi. I don't even think about it anymore.

Here are some "web search engines" that still work for me without CAPTCHA, Javascript or cookies

Most do not User-Agent (UA) header; some require SNI

https://api.mwmbl.org/?q=example

https://wiby.me/?q=example&p=1

https://monocles.eu/search {post-data q=example&pageno=1}

https://crowdview-next-js.onrender.com/api/search-v3?query=e...

Need SNI

https://www.bing.com/search?q=example&cc=US&first=1

Need SNI

https://www.webcrawler.com/serp?q=what&page=1

Need SNI, UA

NB. I (a) do searching from command line

(b) use UNIX filters I wrote that take SERPs/JSON as input and output SQL/simple HTML

(d) have no familiarity with Javascript-enabled, "AI"-enabled browser experience other than reading comments about it

(e) have other search strategies for finding information, do not rely on "web search engines"

https://search.brave.com/

Feels like Google Search from 2008.

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!

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

Same company

Sure, and one product is the browser, the other is search :-/ @BrendanEich

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

Wow it really does. Thanks for sharing.

You're welcome!

> Feels like Google Search from 2008.

Entered search term. AI response included in the result. Ah, yes. Just like 2008.

This can be disabled, but the results underneath are still good.

Do not use Brave for anything. Not now, now then, not ever. https://www.kevinmuldoon.com/do-not-use-brave-browser/

You do you, I just want a search that shows what I asked and a browser that doesn't suck, is fast and has built in ad blocker, fingerprinting blocker and BS blocker (cookie popup).

At present, it works from commend line although a little slow

No CAPTCHA, no User-Agent header required but need SNI

*command

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.

For about the last to years I've seen the bubble effect creeping in. And, sorry no offence to you personally, to be blunt, I'm not interested in damage control.

When I make a generic search unrelated to a hobby I have and I get as top answer something about my hobby, it's a very red and very flashing red flag of bubble effect.

The nail in the coffin has happened this weekend when some un-asked for auto-correct prevented me from searching what I wanted. The moment a tool gets in the way (whatever the good intentions are), I drop the tool. And, no, most of the time DDG don't know better than me.

Several people have been calling your founder on this, here, me included, and have been ignored. DDG might not need early adopter anymore. Fine by me, I'll move on.

Sorry for the bluntness but the truth is you already lost my as a user.

Sorry for the bluntness, but the truth is you're being a giant asshole to someone that stepped in to learn more about your situation from your perspective to see how the company they work for lost you as a customer. They could have been there for one day or a decade, and may or may not have anything to do with the place the product is at.

You expect some of this from a company perspective, as unhappy users are normally the loudest, but this was an individual trying to learn from you and you just shit on them.

Poor form, dude.

I am not shitting on the guy, I literally said : "sorry no offence to you personally". I am crossed with DDG that for sure.

And I said, many people have complained, here on HN about it, only to be met with the same damage control over and over.

But granted, I could have phrased all that differently. You're right.

Your not caught up on how our culture is changing.

This is the new normal.

On the first point about bubble effect, DuckDuckGo never uses past searches to generate search results, that hasn’t changed and will not change. Is that something you’re seeing on the search results page or maybe in your browser?

What does it use? A reason I switched was to stop localisation of searches, and the dropdown at the top of the page used to be great for that but now doesn’t seem to do much.

For example if I search “pergola” then I get local pergola providers: good. But if I check the box next to my country flag (I.e. to turn localisation off) I _still_ get local pergola providers. Even if I change the region to another country I still get local results (though further down the page).

My country isn’t well known for pergolas as far as I know, and the effect looks bigger than the search reacting to language differences. So why do I still get local results?

You still get local results because that toggle is just one of the signals we use to get search results. Turning it off basically just says “don’t send this country as a signal."

If you selected a different country from the dropdown next to that toggle, instead of switching that toggle off, I would expect that to return results from the selected country instead of showing local results.

I would also expect that but that is not what I see. There are the ads at the top of the page which I do expect to be localised, but further down the page I get local results for my (quite small) country which I would not expect to get if I was in the country that I’ve selected as the search country.

Is there a way that I could use ddg that would return the same result for me as someone else would get? Not someone specific, but a an unbiased result so that I can know that if someone else searched with the same (lack of) parameters they will get the same results?

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

i also use ecosia. actually, ddg, startpage, kagi, or self-hosted search engines are just anonymous queries to google and bing. brave has its own index, but i don't have a very positive impression of the brave browser. so if everything will eventually return to google and bing anyway, why not look at it from a different perspective and use it for reforestation. ecosia's policy is still to send ip addresses to partners like google and bing, but that's just the IP address, not the user profile. google might know where the query is coming from, but it doesn't know who i am. i don't see much point in that. anyway, i'm not doing anything shady; I just don't like feeling like I'm being exploited. but if i know i'm helping the community in some way or doing something meaningful just by querying through ecosia, then i'll accept revealing my ip address to them. oh, and ecosia is partnering with qwant to create its own index, and I will continue to support them

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/

Mojeek is okay, but I think I'd struggle to use it as my primary search. I do include it in my personal metasearch results though, and find it worth paying for their API access (at my usage it's only about $20/year). If a page shows up in both Brave & Mojeek, it's probably a good one.

I thought I'd tried Yacy, but apparently not - it's a distributed search.

SearX is by asciimoo, the same person who has moved on to making Hister. asciimoo just posted about it here a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159436

I feel like Seirdy has the definitive list of search engines, though the list is from 2021:

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

Seirdy pretty regularly updates that list so a lot of it isn't from 2021. Currently the last update happened about a year ago.

Ahh, I see the "last updated" line and the Changelog now! I must have been having a really fuzzy brain day. Thanks for pointing that out!

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 )

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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

That's so sad. :(

StartPage doesn't only block VPN access, but also "regular" connections. And what's worse, it doesn't ask to solve some captcha, but blocks you completely and only shows the form where you can say why you think they are wrong.

Does brave search make any sense for you?

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

What is bubblification?

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.

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

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...

And that's exactly why I moved. And now they broke that trust.

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?

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.

Non-AI Google Search.

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

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.

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

My default browsing habits are in incognito mode. I only open normal browser for websites where I want a persistent session. I haven't noticed the "bubblification" with DDG. And I actually find DDG AI answers helpful (sometimes).

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.

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.

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.

I'm a bit of a privacy nerd, but even so it still took me a while to convince myself it was worth paying for a search engine.

Ever since getting over that, however, I've been extremely happy with Kagi. Couldn't recommend it more.

Paying for Kagi Ultimate. Never going back to "free" search engines.

I had a little money invested in Presearch through Wefunder, but it went bust a few days ago. I thought it was interesting. Maybe someone can buy out the technology.

I've been using https://startpage.com for more than ten years and can't fault it.

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

So much love for Kagi going around, yet people seem to forget or are not familiar with all the history and facts behind the company and their CEO...

If interested, read this https://paste.rs/MzFL9

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!

Brave search is decent. Moat of the time the ai bubble at the top juat has the answer too

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

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.

Wouldn't you do better say indexing Wikipedia, then what it links directly, then what those link directly?

As you note, you got into an adult content 'bubble'. Going to random sites doesn't mean that site is good in anyway. Wikipedia, or some other proxy for quality at least gives you a good baseline.

If you're aiming to index all of the web, you should have the same endpoint, but in the meantime my way, you are indexing 'good' sites

My crawling approach did hit Wikipedia several times, and crawled a number of pages, but not the entire site at once.

With either approach, we would both eventually end up with all the websites - that being a surprisingly small number (~1 billion of which we only ever access ~1000).

I got in an adult content bubble from starting with "A" ("Adult") and would have hit another one presumably at "X". But "B" had quite a few too, lol.

Most of the words were bubbles - where it spent a decent amount of time on each one and I wondered if it would ever move on or was stuck. There are just a lot of backlinks and tangents for every word you can think of.

Another fun thing about this experiment is you will find a lot more international websites that no other search engine will find - some weird personal sites and some surprisingly good forums.

But yeah, you could enter anywhere - Wikipedia, or some other random Array of words. It doesn't have to be a dictionary.

You could just pull tls cert registrations CT logs, way easier.

Or https://crt.sh

502 - Bad Gateway

Another cool thing about Mistral 7b is it runs offline, and I don't need to download any massive URL list that may or may not be current.

It does the work of finding URLs at runtime, offline (until it verifies the URL exists).

Another option: https://www.certkit.io/tools/ct-logs/

Looks like they only give you 100 on a trial account

Sorry, let me be more obvious.

I am not pointing to a solution, but a pointer to the solution. Showing what is possible. The solution is pulling/parsing the CT logs yourself.

If you’re talking about SSL cert logs, that excludes a ton of web content.

And you haven’t shown me that you can even get all those for free anyway

> If you’re talking about SSL cert logs, that excludes a ton of web content.

I guess it depends on what you are looking for?

It's far less brute force than trying to randomly generate hostnames and then do lookups, and your solution also misses everything that is just random alphanumeric combinations, of which there are tons.

> And you haven’t shown me that you can even get all those for free anyway

Free? Maybe.

Yeah, but because it's an LLM it makes very good guesses. It's not so random, it's seen URLs in training data.

One of the points of the experiment was to see how much of a shortcut using an LLM could give me, as the developer.

I've done other LLM search experiments where I basically just prompt to "predict 25 search results for this query" and it's surprisingly good. You can also run a check to verify the URLs to splice hallucinations out of the result, but yeah, LLM is already doing a lot of the work for search.

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