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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
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
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.
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!
I think this could use some elaboration on what you mean by half dead.
OP wanted gifs with reavers from firefly, but got a bunch of “reverse” gifs instead, so to OP DDG is half dead and worth nothing.
Not the first time I’ve seen DDG whiff an easy query
I mean, it’s not unreasonable for the search engine to assume OP just didn’t know how to spell “reverse” or mistyped it…statistically that’s probably way more likely.
Annoying, yes…but being specific in search queries is always a good idea, most people just tend to be super vague in their search queries.
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 🙂
Elaboration: shit aint workin
Works for me.
Did you find the reavers gif?
I found multiple gifs, including ones from Firefly and Soul Reaver as the top results. Further down the page, there’s “reverse” gifs, too.
Anyway, this is just lazy searching. Adding the word “Firefly” brings up all the relevant Firefly results you could want.
Oh so you want me to spend an extra fraction of a second to avoid an absolute privacy nightmare that could follow me around for the rest of my life?! (including potential price discrimination stealing e.g. a better retirement from me)
😉 thanks for testing!
I dunno why yours was weird. Maybe Apple is doing something odd behind the scenes.
Yeah, just me. Not available externally without VPN access.
Pretty sure DDG just uses bing results. Try in bing OP see what you get.
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?
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)
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!
It’s learning!
Try safe search off instead of the default moderate.
I just did it on DDG, Firefox Mobile, moderate safe search level.
I got tons of Soul Reaver gifs, so it’s just you. Google probably got relevant results, because it likely has a sprawling profile of your interests. No idea why your DDG is so fucked up.
And it’s different now! Reminded of how DDG rearranges search results when opening a result link, then hitting back, but much more extreme.
sprawling profile
Using a fresh [cookie-isolated] private tab for every search and going through iCloud Private Relay… I still have no doubt they still manage it. Sigh. Those “am I unique?” browser fingerprinting tests still show I’m unique, perhaps due to having an extension or two installed on Safari? Creepy.
OK, I feel better now. On searxng.site, I disabled all engines except for Google and I’m getting results similar to in my OP.
I think Google uses certain fingerprints, like location data, IPs you tend to connect from, etc. In my experience, they’re good at figuring out who and where you are.
