this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
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DuckDuckGo can't provide search results that aren't AI slop it seems

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[–] LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins@hexbear.net 22 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Is there a recipe website that JUST has recipes

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Cooks.com is pretty lightweight and puts the recipe first. Allrecipes doesn't have the multimedia popups and their "introductions" are shorter.

It's sad that all the small-time recipe websites are maximally incentivized to be attentional black holes.

I think allrecipes might be the best that I regularly use because their "jump to recipe" button always works

You can host your own

I believe that project also scrubs recipe pages and cuts out fluf and ads

[–] Bronstein_Tardigrade@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Has anyone tried "Ask Jeeves" lately? Search results from 2000 would probably be better that the dredge spewed forth now.

[–] mendiCAN@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

"lycos! go get it!"

[–] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Out of curiosity - I googled "Ask Jeeves". It renamed itself ask.com. I did a test search for "Trump news". The results were so bad they made me laugh.

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

but have you checked the autocomplete?

did you know about 45office.com? I never saw it before. Fuck man I'm gonna have to make a separate post just about the Contact Us page.

[–] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago

but have you checked the autocomplete?

I am sorry. I was negligent in my duties.

trump is lying sack of orange

I like that.

[–] razorcandy@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

DuckDuckGo has options to turn off their AI summary, hide AI-generated images, and filter your searches by date. Setting a date range before popularization of AI gives better results.

StartPage is another decent search engine option. I’ve also heard positive things about Kagi (paid) and SearXNG although I haven’t used these myself.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 3 days ago (2 children)

The SEO referral blog scum are what I believe OP is talking about. The reason I get to page 3 before finding anything useful.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

Yep, this happened over the past few months or so to DDG. Nearly every result is AI-generated blogspam. Its almost unusable now.

[–] comrade_pibb@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago

Yeah it's maddening. I'm trying out Kagi and so far it seems to be pretty good

[–] calidris@hexbear.net 2 points 3 days ago

I wonder how long we can keep up the whole pre-AI date trick. Guess it depends on what you're searching for.

[–] BadTakesHaver@hexbear.net 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How do you do the date range filtering? When I try it with DuckDuckGo it never works

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 2 points 3 days ago

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/dates

presumably it relies on the pages to accurately report their own dates.

[–] daniyeg@hexbear.net 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

use a metasearch engine like searXNG. it combines results from different search engines and you can decide what to include in it.

[–] Thordros@hexbear.net 12 points 3 days ago

Query: "Pokémon Legends: Z-A mega evolution mechanics datamining Reddit"

Results x20: "Top 25 NEW mega evutions LEAKDD Nner 37 will SHOCK YOU!!"

I just wanted to know if it did anything other than type shifting or plussing moves. I still don't know.

a-guy

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 7 points 3 days ago

I use browser plugin ublacklist to block block block shit domains.

I generally use ddg but it gets shittier and shitter. Though ddg has recently added a ublacklist-type feature to it's native interface, I don't use.

Also

We need community oriented, run and federated search engines.

[–] dastanktal@hexbear.net 12 points 3 days ago

Its all slop. You can tweak settings but even google is full of ai slop. I would use multiple search engines again like we used to back in the day

[–] MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Set the date of your search to before 2020 to avoid COVID and AI slop ruining the results.

Otherwise if you need more up to date information, you're going to have to get good at telling apart AI slop from human slop.

[–] Dessa@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net 5 points 3 days ago

Not slop, but it's a distinct period where lots of people where activity on the internet was different. Like for instance, a lot of people in school or university were doing exams online and so forth.

[–] stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Kagi is good. It costs money though.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

About as good as ddg 5 years ago I'd say.

[–] stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net 9 points 3 days ago

Which is to say phenomenal in comparison to what passes for search today.

[–] supafuzz@hexbear.net 2 points 3 days ago

It is good enough that I almost never try my query elsewhere, and when I do the results are usually even worse.

[–] Moidialectica@hexbear.net 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not really, but of the bunch, Yandex is unironically good because it uses a different method to give results than Google or Bing

Try Yandex for a change see if you like it.

[–] sunshine@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

is that then non-free one?

[–] Moidialectica@hexbear.net 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

If you're asking 'is that a paid service' then no, it's essentially russian Google and free to access

If you're asking 'is it privacy conscious' then no, it steals as much data as others, but for Russia instead

If you're asking 'is it open source' then no, it is closed source, and using a client like searXNG to interface with it is too much hard work since the way Yandex does searches (the thing that makes it different from Google) relies on the users and not search optimisation, so Yandex is extreme on detecting if it is an actual browser or not

DDG honestly has terrible result quality. Google results are fine, but the page layout isn't. I use Kagi, though I found that a tweaked SearXNG had comparable result quality (though much worse ordering of the final results).

[–] mattyroses@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 3 days ago

Just switched to Kagi, highly recommend

[–] KnilAdlez@hexbear.net 5 points 3 days ago

I have rolled my own search engine with SearchXNG, you can host your own or there is a list of public instances here. Of course a public instance can track visitors, much like google.

[–] Banned@hexbear.net 3 points 3 days ago

Removed by mod

[–] bobs_guns@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 3 days ago

The solution is to aggressively block every search result domain that wastes your time using a browser extension or built-in search engine feature. Kagi has a built in feature to block domains from search results.

[–] MF_COOM@hexbear.net 2 points 3 days ago

Weird I don't get any llm responses on DDG