I tried to switch and ended up using both, I use duckduckgo not for privacy but practical reasons: recently google has become extremely irritating for technical searches that are not popular, even for the ones it can find it now autocorrects them by default to "what it thinks you meant", which for technical things like parameter names, command names, APIs etc are always wrong, even though the whole search phrase is extremely descriptive and matchable.
I found that DDG is good for these types of searches (esoteric technical search that might be clobbered by googles dumb "AI" autocorrect or SEO optimization / I cant tell if it's an ad anymore BS that slows you right down), for these you get the result immediately and with one click... but DDG is worse for popular things where the search phrase is less descriptive and more associative.
So now - I use both, DDG by default because it's faster to get to the result with less shit in the way; then back to google for the few popular things...
I think this isn't too bad of a deal for privacy either, everyone assumes you must completely switch a service, but if you only search popular things on google, then you will look just like everyone else, you starve them of specificity.
Startpage: "You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs."
Searx is a meta search engine. You can gather results from gogle.
Startpage also shows ads at the top of the search results. It claims not to track the user (similar to DDG, which also shows ads but doesn’t track the user). But there was news about Startpage being acquired a few months ago, and the trust in it has dropped for some people.
I find that it varies by query, and often dry will give better results. Especially if I am looking for something more than a few weeks old, or off the beaten path.
Google will often replace or ignore words in my query and return garbage.
I tried to switch and ended up using both, I use duckduckgo not for privacy but practical reasons: recently google has become extremely irritating for technical searches that are not popular, even for the ones it can find it now autocorrects them by default to "what it thinks you meant", which for technical things like parameter names, command names, APIs etc are always wrong, even though the whole search phrase is extremely descriptive and matchable.
I found that DDG is good for these types of searches (esoteric technical search that might be clobbered by googles dumb "AI" autocorrect or SEO optimization / I cant tell if it's an ad anymore BS that slows you right down), for these you get the result immediately and with one click... but DDG is worse for popular things where the search phrase is less descriptive and more associative.
So now - I use both, DDG by default because it's faster to get to the result with less shit in the way; then back to google for the few popular things...
I think this isn't too bad of a deal for privacy either, everyone assumes you must completely switch a service, but if you only search popular things on google, then you will look just like everyone else, you starve them of specificity.