How about actually improving the search results? It's my default search, which means most of the time I have to do a search twice.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
196 points (95.0% liked)
Privacy
32456 readers
1110 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I had switched to DDG search and, like you, was getting more and more frustrated with their results. I then switched to SwissCows (https://swisscows.com/) and have never considered another search engine since. The results I want are always top 5. Every time. I sopped testing alternatives long ago and am extremely content using SwissCows! I would recommend checking it out!
Business model
Swisscows is financed by advertising revenues and other services. Because Swisscows does not monitor users and thus does not save or pass on user data either for themselves or for others, Swisscows has developed its own advertising concept. The concept is a software technology called AdAnounce that works similar to Google AdWords technology, with the important exception that user data is not passed on to the advertiser.
In addition to advertising revenues, Swisscows also makes turnover with software projects, technology licensing and plans to provide additional software and hardware services. All these services guarantee privacy.
Will check it out. Would love to use Google search less but nothing really worked for me.
Please do! Again, the results I've gotten (personally) have been far superior to Google or any other reasonable alternative.
Interesting, it's sad that for me the search is quiet garbage and feed me with result based on my IP/location and I couldn't find a option to change that like DDG does.
Garbage results compared to google results? Lol. You sure you're using SwissCows? Lol. DDG was my default before switching to SwissCows and I find SwissCows much better, personally.
Uhg it drives me nuts when I search for some obscure programming topic and then I get links to local restaurants. That's not what I was searching for!
I tried to use it, but when I searched for stuff like "kdenlive reddit" it blocks the search because it may contain violence and pornography
It says they use Bing behind the scenes and deliver search ads from Bing as well.
This is not true. A 2-min look shows they are a Swiss-based, private search engine that does not serve ads (on mobile only apparently) and has its own web index, but also uses Bing’s web index.
Apparently, they do serve adds on desktop but they're based on anonymous search results and I presume having UBlock installed would resolve this.
Medium has a whole write-up here: https://medium.com/secure-words/try-swisscows-privacy-search-for-mobile-what-are-you-waiting-for-e616dd828328
I just got that from the website itself, unless I’m misreading it:
I believe you are correct. However, only on desktop. The Medium article specifically states they do not use ads on mobile so I believe ads are only on desktop. I typically use on mobile and have not seen any ads, nor on my non-mobile Firefox config when using SwissCows. Again, the ads are based on anonymous search results and in terms of relevant search results, at least in my testing, SwissCows far surpassed competitors.
are you working for swisscows?
lol. Nope, it was just the best search alternative to Google and DDG that I found worked for me. Thought I’d throw in my 2 cents. Isn’t that the point of this place?!
I've been using duckduckgo for years. It used to be great. Nowadays whenever I use it I have to redo the search with !g or !b again to see the same garbage results and maybe between the three of them I find what I was looking for.
Now I'm using searx with 3 4 enignes selected to at least get their results in the same page. It's slower than I like it to be but overall it's faster than redoing the search in multiple engines.
Agree. I find solace in SearXNG -- https://baresearch.org
But these past few years the search algorithms have changed to be anticonsumer and now users are using social sites to get information fast.
In effect the Internet has taken the place of Cable News and been ruined and dumbed down.
If you search a lot, you should really look into Kagi Search, "a highly accurate, lightning-fast, user-centric, 100% privacy-respecting search engine with results augmented by non-commercial indexes and personalized searches." Much better than the ad-supported ones, or even DDG, in my experience.
Nah, it's definitely not important enough for me to pay for it.
Kagi may not sound good on its own, but what if I told you that they also turn around and give your money to a roundly disliked bigot, and cannot be dissuaded from doing this?
The problem is that you are required to give them your payment information and you need an account. That doesn't sound privacy respecting to me.
Why does Kagi Search require an account? Kagi Search requires an account only because it is a paid service which requires an account for the transaction. Note that Kagi does not collect any personal information for billing and that you can even use an anonymous payment card such as Privacy if you want to.
I'm not terribly thrilled with it, but a lot of VPNs do as well. Plus, this is their business model. If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. If they're caught double dipping (taking our money and lying about logging to sell), they'll be out of business shortly.
They do claim to log practically nothing. https://kagi.com/privacy
Yeah, there are definitely better alternatives. If they allowed you to pay in cash and there website was free of non-free JavaScript I would be at least willing to try it.
Well they don't know literally everything said you so of course it's a bit off.
I've just started to search a bit more specific. Works well
Both DDG and Google search is so bad these days that I actually started using Bing. At least with Bing, you can ask the AI to find that specific thing for you. Works almost as well as simply adding site:reddit.com to all of your DDG searches, sometimes better even.
Is it just me or am i the only one who simply just backs up the bookmark files? There are like 2 files. The html list and the actual bookmark file. Takes like 5 seconds to do it.