I've also noticed that if you do a search, click a result, then hit back to go back to the results they manipulate the results in some weird way so they're not the exact same results you got the first time. Infuriating

Odd. I wonder what is going on here because when I search that exact same query I get accurate results.

I’ve had iffy search results before but never anything that bad.

great. i finally get off google and now duckduckgo is bad. i hate the internet.

It has been doing this shit for a while. Returning results based on just one key word out of many keywords from my query.

Lately they have been even ignoring the restrictive +"keyword" syntax and returning whatever shit just so they won't admit their (or Microsoft's indexer) is shit

What would we suggest as a realistic alternative? Sears? Startpage? Brave? (I am no expert by the way, just looking for tips)

Try kagi.com

I you have to pay for it, but t's amazing

If you’re looking for a new search engine, I’ve been using paid search provider, Kagi.com, for the last few months. They’ve been great.

I get the same shit at work where I can't use a VPN: like 7-8 relevant results then basically just ads for local businesses after that.

I have still the same good results in ddg, no matter what device or browser. I have noticed that they have some location bias when ddg (and any other search engine i have tried) has non good results globaly but good resulta locally.

Still better then anything i have tested. Just because there are minor anomalies i will stick with them.

The only time I use ddg is to find conspiracy sites to add to the blocklist I maintain. All the trash rises to the top in that search engine. It's rubbish.

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I have searx, and i'm feeling like a god of search, better than google, better that bingbinggo, and anything else Although I had a lot of problems with it when I was hosting it on a RPI and docker, now i'm not, and it's just so much better

Same here. Every time I ditch Google and go to ddg, I just laugh how irrelevant all the results are and I continue feeding Google with personal data and telemetry and whatnot.

It is true that even Google's results feel much worse than before but it's still significantly better than ddg.

My browser (Firefox) is configured the same way.

No issues with your search term here. I think you have gremlins.

On DDG I can type in an exact company or product name and not get a proper result, it's crazy. Google seems to find the stuff no problem, it's really quite frustrating when the search engine isn't even capable of basic queries.

Yes, I have the same issue with DDG for something like a year now. I can't use it anymore for basic searches, I feel like the bing api they are using is getting worse and worse.

I paid for Kagi and have been super happy with it. If you don't mind paying, I highly recommend it. Not having ads or manipulated results is worth it for me.

I turned JS off other than for specific websites. This includes DDG. It gives me accurate results, although the other commenters don't seem be facing your problem either

I use DDG, tho' it's with a VPN. And it seems to work just fine. shrug

Kagi!!! It's cost money but it's cheap. If you do alot of searches it's worth it

It might be blindly searching for websites that contain any of the words scan, mark 2, pro.

It seems to do that when it can't find a page with all of the words, and the only way I know to fix it is put the whole thing in quotation marks.

I've never seen the point of this search engine or any commercial alternative to google. It's all just varying layers of proxy to Google. You might as well just find a searx instance and use that because it's all the same crap at the end of the day.

I feel like Qwant has become the best when it comes to the quality of the search results. My experience with kagi is limited, though.