I’m trying to degoogle. I’ve heard good things about DuckDuckGo and I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and it’s pretty solid. But I’m just wondering what the Lemmy/Piefed community prefer for a search engine.
I’m trying to degoogle. I’ve heard good things about DuckDuckGo and I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and it’s pretty solid. But I’m just wondering what the Lemmy/Piefed community prefer for a search engine.
Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.
For those who don’t know, most “independent” search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they’re still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.
Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they’re collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they’re already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.