DDG isn't all that great anymore either because they get their results from Bing - which has also gone to shit. Any alternative search providers that gets their results from Google or Bing (which is most of them) are all nearly worthless now, IMHO. The ones that operate their own engines and crawlers, such as Kagi, are the ones that give results like we used to get before enshittification.
But then again, with the death of web forums and everything being consolidated into a small handful of sites, site:reddit.com is required for almost every search query I do these days. If I want to read something written by an actual human being then I need to look up via Reddit or else results are just 98% AI-generated SEO garbage. Like I wish I was making that up but the majority of search results now are actual throwaway trash; pages upon pages of completely nonsensical generated rubbish.
If you want some good search results give me $5 and I can get you good search results. They are way better than Google. Just give me $5 I swear I'm good for it.
haha, its really a great service. I always feel semi-obligated to mention it because I, selfishly, don't want them to go away. The more people use it the less likely that will happen. I dont want to have to go back to google.
DDG uses more than just Bing, and they filter out many results from Bing.
Bing is their primary source of results for the traditional search entries, but if they’re able to determine the category of your search, they directly leverage specialized search engines instead.
myself lately, and they can all use DDG. Being able to get specialized searches sent to the appropriate engine automatically or being able to choose the engine(s) manually is really nice. But they don’t have their own web crawler.
I’m starting to look into Yacy - which is supported by Searx - as a means to add a p2p web crawler and index under my control to the mix.
If you’re seeing sponsored results in Google and you’re running uBlock Origin in Firefox then there’s something wrong. You might have an adware extension installed or some other issue on your machine, you might have disabled the filters that block those results in uBlock or might have a conflicting extension, or you might just need to update your filter lists.
Of course that doesn’t help the actually quality of results. You can use Let's Block It! - Search Engine Results to build a filter that can be added to uBlock Origin. This lets you customize the list for your search engine(s) of choice, and it has checkboxes to automatically block a lot of sites that just mirror content.
However, uBlacklist might be a better option, and Awesome uBlacklist includes a link to a list dedicated to blocking content farm links (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wdmpa/content-farm-list/main/uBlacklist.txt is the list itself that you would add as a uBlacklist subscription).