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Two horizontally stitched screenshots comparing a search for “Reavers GIF” on DuckDuckGo and Google in Safari iOS (private tabs). DDG presented zero Firefly/Serenity relevant results while Google found them exclusively.
Hopefully a privacy-focused yet fast instance for US West Coast cheapskates who probably should pony up for Kagi, buttttttttttt
I think this could use some elaboration on what you mean by half dead.
Elaboration: shit aint work
You’re right :) Dumb little joke about the show I shoehorned in.
For context, DuckDuckGo is my default search engine. I do at least a dozen searches every day. Approximately 90% of the time, I use a bang (!g) to punch out to Google and receive results I perceive to be of higher quality 99% of the time. I am absolutely elated when I hit the back button because DDG had a better result in the top 3.
Ddg is my main search, it is complete garbage, but I’m someone who used altavista for almost a decade.
You don’t rely on the engine and just get good at crafting your queries (firefly reaver gif).
Getting good at queries, I’m down for that, thanks 🙂
what do you mean? I got tons of reavers, and not just Firefly but also Serenity and Warhammer
It decided not to do a hidden autocorrect to reverse this time:
(Same everything (new private tab), just zoomed out.)
Hmm!
Pretty sure DDG just uses bing results. Try in bing OP see what you get.
Oh Bing
Search is hard
Good call though, I’ve done comparisons and it’s very Bingy though not 1:1 - search operators behave differently IIRC (quotation marks)
And what’s SearX? Isn’t it also bing?
48 engines available on a SearXNG instance I just checked:
Amazing project!
why is it that when I search for images, it’s heavily anime?
Try safe search off instead of the default moderate.
Does putting “Reavers” in quotes help?
Good question, something I wondered about after I posted.
Nope - OK, you know what helps?
Searching via the DDG site and then tapping images. Apparently I typed “reavers gif !ddgi” to save the tap and it does a hidden spelling correction to “reverse”?!
One mystery solved!
Edit: annotation in a dark font due to iOS 18 Markup bug, sorry it’s hard to see there in the upper right
https://searx.garudalinux.org/
https://search.garudalinux.org/
is
be
instances will get rate limited so you will have to hop around
Great recommendations, and you got a Whoogle in there as well!
Looking into some of those instance maintainers.
Thank you!
None, I self host Whoogle.
Nice. Are you the only one on your instance? I seem to recall reading there’s a privacy consideration there. Like, maybe the ideal is knowing the maintainer and having some number of people all using it.
Yeah, just me. Not available externally without VPN access.
