Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of "AI" stuff, but come on, one of these isn't even in English, and that's what I have my language set to.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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yup, literally just use a good seatch engine and you'll find everything you need (idek what OP is using is that startpage?)
OP is using SearxNG, an Open-Source, Self Host able metasearch engine which is not going to work well unless you set your own settings correctly and tailor them to how you use the web. StartPage is just proxied google results. SearxNG can proxy StartPage, but these results are from Bing.
Yeah I didn't realize my settings weren't configured right, so I did so, came back today and found they were switched back! That's why I was struggling. I have SearxNG in my whitelist for cookies too, so no idea why that's happening. With the settings changed, it works great!
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I know. I'm trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.
The noai.duckduckgo.com URL is important to notice in the screenshot.
SearXNG is a mixed bag to be honest...I find that Ononoki's SearXNG delivers decent results...It's a bit mixed at times with PieFed being the third option. Some topics are surfaced better than others, so your mileage will vary with SearXNG.
Using the No AI version of DuckDuckGo sends them a message that their bet on "AI" isn't going to win them any accolades. It's an easy way to push back. As they are tracking those metrics and people can see the numbers of how many users disapprove of AI.
Bing and yahoo are VERY bad, it seems they detect that they are being used through proxies, I made another comment for what i use in searxng.
DDG's backend is really just Bing, though ...
They give different results, it seems they have different treatment to the data, which is interesting. Startpage gives different results than google, duckduckgo gives different results than bing, but on the bigger picture, a bigger sample gives the statistically optimal result??? (closer to the source truth on the most probable good result) question mark, huge number theory on statistics.
(i'm drunk)
Bing in a sandboxed session yielded results identical to DDG in my experiments.
In searxng they don't give the same results, bing brings some completely different stuff both on an selfhosted instance and on an public instance (it just gives random garbage), it seems proxying does some stuff to bings internal algorithm, as google is different than startpage on searxng.
Edit: a screenshot showing it.
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Ah shit, I forgot to turn both those off. Ugh, I've been playing browser shuffle...Good catch!
What search engine?
It's just Bing wearing a duck hat anyway
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Instead of getting a search service with some ads on the side, you're provided ads with search results sprinkled in
Bing on searxng is shit, yahoo ultimately is bad too, I use this combination, it helps a lot:
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Switch to Startpage, it's actually pretty great
I like Startpage, but I had to switch to DDG because it was giving me captchas constantly for using a VPN.
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This doesn't look right:
I use searxng too, it's decent mostly. Check your language settings?
I see you're trying to solve the problem, that's nice 🙂
But I had to laugh at the sites logic: Let's detect users language, Ah! Must be country xyz, with knowing that: Go to chat GPT and ask there 😂
It's such a bad search result, doesn't matter if language is set or not.
Whaaat? That's bizarre, I swear I had that set.
Nope, it wasn't set. Still returned weird results so I'll try that configuration the other commenter posted.
In Startpage
I searched up how to stop a stratis pool (Redhat knockoff ZFS) and Google gleefully gave me instructions to destroy the stratis pool, and then claimed there was no way to take down a stratis pool without destroying the data.
I think clicked on the top link which was a RedHat article that told you right from the beginning that it's stratis pool stop --name
Only reason I had to even search was because I didn't have the stratis CLI installed, so no manpage
We're rapidly approaching a time where you have to curate your own list of helpful websites again, cause search engines are useless.
https://www.mankier.com/
Not even google tries to hide it
I hate subs, for any kind of entertainment most of all, but I think they’re necessary for VPN/private email.
I’m adding an another item to that list. Kagi. De-enshittified search results. My partner bought it, so it’s a shared sub, but I’m sold on it. It’s like it’s 2005 again, and that’s a good thing.
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to use searx(ng) effectively you'll need to set up your own preferences, not the default
from the screenshot, the instance caches and shows results from bing only, ass.
it also use auto as default which will show personalized language results based on the instance's ip (although it's mainly yours), change that to all
you can do both just by changing and saving your preferences. for example here's mine
Use startpage or kagi or searxng
I’ve been genuinely happy with Kagi.
I love that you can rewrite URLs. Reddit seems to block old.reddit.com from being indexed, but I have a URL rewrite in Kagi so you can site: reddit.com (or use a Reddit lense) then when you click links it goes to old.reddit.com
Literally the only case I use this but it's the example Kagi uses so it was probably made specifically for this purpose.
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