I've also noticed that if you do a search, click a result, then hit back to go back to the results they manipulate the results in some weird way so they're not the exact same results you got the first time. Infuriating

Odd. I wonder what is going on here because when I search that exact same query I get accurate results.

I’ve had iffy search results before but never anything that bad.

great. i finally get off google and now duckduckgo is bad. i hate the internet.

It has been doing this shit for a while. Returning results based on just one key word out of many keywords from my query.

Lately they have been even ignoring the restrictive +"keyword" syntax and returning whatever shit just so they won't admit their (or Microsoft's indexer) is shit

What would we suggest as a realistic alternative? Sears? Startpage? Brave? (I am no expert by the way, just looking for tips)

Try kagi.com

I you have to pay for it, but t's amazing

I have searx, and i'm feeling like a god of search, better than google, better that bingbinggo, and anything else Although I had a lot of problems with it when I was hosting it on a RPI and docker, now i'm not, and it's just so much better

I have still the same good results in ddg, no matter what device or browser. I have noticed that they have some location bias when ddg (and any other search engine i have tried) has non good results globaly but good resulta locally.

Still better then anything i have tested. Just because there are minor anomalies i will stick with them.

I get the same shit at work where I can't use a VPN: like 7-8 relevant results then basically just ads for local businesses after that.

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As someone who is a data hoarder/curator and dives into the deep ends of web abyss, I use Searx, Startpage and Yandex. I do not mind Startpage only because I no longer use search engines that much anymore. If something truly needs to be searched, Yandex is the absolute, untouchable king for web, image and reverse image searching, and is better than Google for privacy (very low bar but > Google/Bing).

Searx usually does deliver for the common use cases, and Startpage gives Google results minus SEO and sponsored trash.

If I were to rank them for results based on years of experience, Yandex is easily a 10 (ignoring its unbeatable image search), Searx with "default/all" language results a 7, Startpage a 5 (censors Russian/Chinese sources since it is based on Google), Qwant probably 3.5-4 (unavailable in many regions), Google 3, DDG and Bing 2. I am not sure how Metager, Mojeek and Kagi fare, but they probably perform somewhere between Searx with "default/all" language results and DDG.

Why Yandex is so above Searx metasearch is because its indexing is a lot faster than once a day, besides giving the experience of what Google was around 2009/10 and with no SEO crap. You will find the most obscure personal blog and website there, and DMCA bullshit does not work in Russia, which would work on any of these other search engines or metasearch instance owners.

On DDG I can type in an exact company or product name and not get a proper result, it's crazy. Google seems to find the stuff no problem, it's really quite frustrating when the search engine isn't even capable of basic queries.

Yes, I have the same issue with DDG for something like a year now. I can't use it anymore for basic searches, I feel like the bing api they are using is getting worse and worse.

If you’re looking for a new search engine, I’ve been using paid search provider, Kagi.com, for the last few months. They’ve been great.

I feel like ddg has never had good search results

I turned JS off other than for specific websites. This includes DDG. It gives me accurate results, although the other commenters don't seem be facing your problem either

I paid for Kagi and have been super happy with it. If you don't mind paying, I highly recommend it. Not having ads or manipulated results is worth it for me.

Same here. Every time I ditch Google and go to ddg, I just laugh how irrelevant all the results are and I continue feeding Google with personal data and telemetry and whatnot.

It is true that even Google's results feel much worse than before but it's still significantly better than ddg.

It might be blindly searching for websites that contain any of the words scan, mark 2, pro.

It seems to do that when it can't find a page with all of the words, and the only way I know to fix it is put the whole thing in quotation marks.

I feel like Qwant has become the best when it comes to the quality of the search results. My experience with kagi is limited, though.

My browser (Firefox) is configured the same way.

No issues with your search term here. I think you have gremlins.

Looks like you are using Firefox. Use arkenfox sure, but cut Mozilla off it's 115 server network it uses to track you via FF by using a host deny list, FOSS git clone harden-firefox. You'll have to disable to update ublock origin or remove the extensions line, but it's better to just cut the adverts and tracking by removing it from the networks than by browser interception (slower, loss of performance, still hits your computer). Links included to do that in that repo.

Alternative browers are Librewolf and Qutebrowser. When you really don't want to be tracked for some things use Lynx.

A great search engine replacement is Grasp. It's being funded by Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator and although you only get 100 free searches a months, it can come in very handy. The search results it gives you, unlike Kagi which is just a reformat of DuckDuckgo yet with AI, it's results are completely different than any other engine and imo, on point, surely for anything technical.

My general search engine is an envs.net free hosting of Searx. envs.net is a free Linux shell community with many services like blogs, email, matrix hosting, etc etc. If you do end up using their German Searx as main search donate to them, I did.

I use DDG, tho' it's with a VPN. And it seems to work just fine. shrug

Working fine here. OP are you sure it’s not your network?