The question of what to use for web searching comes up every couple months or so, and I always suggest using Searxng, as others like u/KnilAdlez and u/hello_hello already did in this thread. It's best if you can self host it just because you can fine tune it exactly how you want, you won't get rate limited, and it's just always slightly better privacy-wise when you do it yourself, but if you don't want to set that up, you can just go directly to one of the public instances and use that right away. You can even tweak and fine tune those a bit if you click the settings button.

But yes, DDG is terrible. The CEO even openly stated they were "deprioritizing" (in other words, hiding) any results that might include "Russian propaganda" (in other words, anything that didn't align with NATO propaganda especially regarding Ukraine). And it would be very naive to think they stopped there as far as filtering of your results based on their political alignment. They also lie about being privacy-friendly when they are anything but. However that doesn't mean you should just go back to using Google, one of the great evils of the internet, as someone else suggested, especially when you can get Google search results (and any other free engine's results) without ever having to interact with it by using Searxng.

searched up some apparently common Lebanese dish and it spit out pictures of buildings

Seems like it was missing
'supper' intelligence

I call 118 118

I've been through this struggle. You just have to use google for good results.

There's an AI filter list in uBlock Origin you can turn on.

"superintelligence" wtf?

anyway duckduckgo is pro-AI trash that polled its users, found that the overwhelming majority of them didn't like or want AI, and told them to piss off to some custom url that disables the AI shit instead of making it default. the results are full of LLM spam regardless of which variant you use and their AI filter doesn't work at all.

i've found dogpile to be pretty okay

Duckduckgo gets its sources from Bing and its own collection of crawlers. I mostly use duckduckgo because they have a HTML only webpage.

If you want something else you can use a meta search engine like seaxng that indexes from Google's results or another web crawler like Brave search.

There's also Kagi which you can use for free indefinitely since they don't disallow email aliases.

Try priv.au, searxng is customizable

You have to pay for it, but Kagi feels like Google used to ten plus years ago. Privacy focused and no ads, so they are best served by giving you a good result quickly to get you off the site.

A forehead kiss ♥

DDG is just screaming of Bing with slightly less telemetry. At least you can turn the AI off, but I switched to Kagi a while ago, and it's been good.

startpage.com

I just use DeepSeek for searching nowadays

I have a searxng instance that searches yahoo, yandex, startpage, and duckduckgo and all those combined gives me good results

Depends on need, Yandex is good for some applications such as searching for piracy related stuff

Yeah DDG has gone to shit recently. I know its just Bing underneath, but still.

I only use it because of the bangs search. I heard Kagi is really good but it is paid.