this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
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So, I disabled everything AI the I can think of, use DDG as a search engine, ad block wherever, blah blah blah, my search results SUCK. Is there a better way to fix it?
And I use Linux at home...no blows crap
I use SearXNG it works pretty well for me.
Kagi is pretty decent but the sad truth is that something like duck.ai works better as a search engine than normal search engines
Suck in what way? And what kind of stuff do you usually search?
I used to think search was kind of an universal thing but after looking at some people's examples of what is a good or bad result I noticed that is definitely not the case.
For me a good search result is a list of sites that contain the words I typed on the search bar, sorted by how closely the words match and then perhaps subsorted by some website ranking system. For that, DDG has been quite decent.
Not OP, but I find the DDG results are SEO sites at the top for pages.
My search: how to fit a dog collar
Top 50 results from DDG:
fitting a dog collar is difficult and many people wonder how to fit a dog collar. This article will show you how to fit a dog collar.
A dog collar is difficult to fit. Perhaps you've wondered how to fit a dog collar.
To be fair, SEO ruined the internet and Internet searches well before AI and it's not DDG's fault. But I would love it if blatant SEO was filtered out of my results.
True, I think I probably just skip over those results and don't even register them anymore. They definitely happen a lot but it's not something I even remembered when I thought about search results.
Part of it might be how Google trained everyone to use natural language queries in their searches.
Instead of “how to fit a dog collar” does
“pet advice” +”dog collar” “guidance for new dog owners”
give you better results?
The idea is to search for a cluster of terms that are likely to be on the page you want to find, but aren’t hyper-focused like SEO pages.
So, I can't really mention actual results after actual queries, a lot of it would be doxxing myself. Maybe that's what it is, I'm trying to get way into my personal life instead of a general search. What I usually look for is not like "this specific thing happened to me" type things, but more like a general consensus. Sometimes it's great, sometimes I'm wondering what the heck happened.
Very curious whether you're old enough to remember how google used to be in say, 2007.
I am and I do, but I didn't mean to say DDG is just as good. It's just been good enough for me.