Btw https://mwmbl.org/ is an interesting project, although not usable yet
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Crawling is not really the elephant in the room, really. The issue is ranking and I don’t see how they plan to address that for having good quality
Startpage uses Google's results, similar to like DDG uses Bing's, I find to be splendid replacement for spying engine.
I've noticed this is the case but not that it's declining. I haven't used it that long.
Admittedly it could be a temporary fluctuation of some kind.
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)
Thank you for the explanation about rankings, and the SearXNG suggestion. I'm trying it now and it looks promising!
(Oh and of course if you don’t want to self host and you don’t want your queries to be proxies by random Joe with the public instances, go for the engine you want to “donate” your attention to. I would go for Ecosia just because they seem the most ethical of all, including DDG…. But your choice)
DuckDuckGo/Bing is pretty bad at finding stuff in my native language. That's why I use Startpage (and sometimes even Google) more nowadays.