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DDG is like what Google used to be.
I like the simplicity always find what I'm looking for, so I haven't tried many other deep cuts.
I'm curious about their new assist tool too.
its answers are sourced by curated credible sources bouncing off of Wikipedia entries, so corroborative fact-finding, which I like.
Tbh... DDG in my opinion gives me way too much porn when it comes to image searching. And sure I could just turn on safe search, but I dont wanna do that and fear it may hide some images that aren't porn that I'd maybe wanna see
that-how? duckduckgo gives you more porn than other search engines? what are you searching for?
are you searching terms on the edge or something?
I don't have safe search on, use it. search function daily and I've never had an accidental porn return, or at least so rarely that I can't remember it happening.
this is a phenomenon worth looking into.
.....
Shirtless fictional men... TmT
huh, I'm surprised DDG can't help you there, I find their image search pretty accurate.
also, I just checked, there are lots of shirtless fictional men. are you searching for one in particular that nobody has made appropriate fan art for you yet?
best of luck.
How often has that happened though? That is, how often have you toggled the safe search to see if you still see the results you want?
You'd really be better off if you left safe search on and only turned it off when you haven't seen what you're expecting to see.
That is, unless your subconscious is really hoping for something salacious, you haven't caught onto that and you're having to find other justifications why you don't want to turn it on. You might want to look inward a bit there. (I'll save you the counter-analysis and say that occasionally I'm curious enough to turn it off and see what's there. Often to disappointment. Usually though, it stays on "moderate".)
Read my name and quickly the idea that I wanna see it becomes invalid 😭
The reason why I get porn is because im often searching up art and characters.
I have a heavy interest in hunky characters and bara lookin dudes. I like searching for art of characters that fit that or just artists that draw em, shirtless dudes is one of the things I- might be looking for👉👈 but that doesnt mean I wanna see full blown genitals 🤢
My reason for wanting to keep safe search off is cus I dont want it omitting whole images or links. I would very much like to just have the NSFW stuff blurred but still show up. Cus sometimes the bot just gets it wrong and the image deadass isnt porn nor is it that bad.
The sad part about that is searching for stuff like this gets you porn, but it's not that frequent it comes up so I stay relatively fine. on DDG it seems to pop up way more frequently than on google. And GOD FORBID I try searching for "Humanoid pokemon/anthro pokemon"
:(
In conclusion. I wanna see cute dudes and sometimes cute girls for reference on stuff, but I dont wanna see straighten up nsfw or only see nsfw. DDG Seems to prioritize the spicy stuff.
I saw the name, but I couldn't tell whether it was meant to be ironic. And even so, there's the implication that you might be interested in inspecting them, which could explain your reasoning.
Nonetheless, I think you should turn safe search on, and only turn it off when you don't see what you want. There's even the halfway option of "moderate" as I mentioned. Give that a try.
No, I don't want Kagi either, I dont wanna to pay a subscription for a search engine just to get what I want.
Well
I tried all the others, Ecosia, Duckduckgo, etc... But they usually fall flat cus they just don't have some of the quirks that Google has that I like, specifically when it comes to image search.
Consider Kagi again. It's worth it.
Startpage is basically just proxied google search results. It also filters out the AI response bullshit.
DDG (Try their AI chat!) + Firefox ESR has been my combo. I find DDG does a poor job with local community or very recent results. I often need to switch to google for that. So I'm curious what people have to say. Before the war, I would have suggested Yandex but now I'm not so sure.
Firefox ESR is very customisable with the extensions. But I'm not aware of a solution to have interactive wallpapers. (You could probably make one if you're a tinkerer.)
Wallpaper engine for interactive wallpapers.
There's mechvibes for system wise keyboard sounds (but you can't do better than just having a good keyboard)
I'm sure there's a Firefox extension for filters, but most browsers focus on actually being good browsers over random gimmicks so you might be out of luck. Value your privacy and your data
Vivaldi browser has a LOT of customisability options but Im not sure if you can make it look like OperaGX
Have you tried Bing? I’ve been using Bing for over a decade now as my default search engine and while people give it crap, I’ve only had to go to Google a handful of times over this span of time and even then, I can’t remember a time that Google had what I was looking for either.
Bing is customizable so you can get rid of some of the fluff that comes with searches that you don’t want that bloats your results. Like you can get rid of the colorful background, the trending news sections, the Copilot LLM results, etc.
One plus that Bing Image search has had over Google for many years now is the ability to let you see the full screen image without doing any funky stuff. Like when you just want to load the jpg/png in the browser without the Google/Bing banner surrounding it…Bing Image search lets you do that with the click of a button. Google removed this feature years ago which was so shitty.
It’s not perfect, not like old Google perfect, but that combined with an adblocker like uBlock Origin and my PiHole works for me to remove from sponsored results (not all, unfortunately).
It has its own set of trackers too. I’m no fan of Microsoft and know this, but we’re at the bottom of the barrel with decent search engines anymore.
I like Bing for the other perks like trending news, Bing Rewards (no joke, I have cashed in for over $400 worth of free stuff from a PC VR headset to fast food gift cards just from doing daily searches), and I use Copilot from time to time as a quick ChatGPT alternative (using ChatGPT, but doesn’t require an account to use so good for a quick Incognito session if needed) and also nice with the history under your account. I prefer to use Copilot in Bing than the Windows app since I don’t want that crap installed to my computer and would rather keep it to the browser.
You may also check into extensions for whatever browser you end up going with. There are a few extensions that can help customize your search results like easily removing a website from the results, for example.
DDG is anonymized bing
Yeah but it’s a different experience, if that’s what OP is looking for in terms of how it delivers the search results.
But if this is solely about the quality of results, then yeah, my recommendation for Bing is irrelevant.
You should give Vivaldi a try for a customizable browser. It has tons of functional customization, perhaps less cosmetic stuff than GX though.
As far as search engines go, I got nothing. I am fairly agnostic about them. If one isn't giving me the desired results, I just try others.
Qwant maybe?
Brave Search is good and it sometimes had a highlights summary or something. Enough of the time it poofs the answer like that and i can move on