We can do better than DuckDuckGo
&gt; they’ve demonstrated gross incompetence in privacy<p>Not sure I buy the example that is given here.<p>1. It&#x27;s an issue in their browser app, not their search service.<p>2. It&#x27;s not completely indefensible: it allows fetching favicons (potentially) much faster, since they&#x27;re cached, and they promise that the favicon service is 100% anonymous anyway.<p>3. They responded to user feedback and switched to fetching favicons locally, so this is no longer an issue. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckduckgo&#x2F;Android&#x2F;issues&#x2F;527#issuecomment-653210967" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckduckgo&#x2F;Android&#x2F;issues&#x2F;527#issuecommen...</a><p>&gt; The search results suck! The authoritative sources for anything I want to find are almost always buried beneath 2-5 results from content scrapers and blogspam. This is also true of other search engines like Google.<p>This part is kinda funny because &quot;DuckDuckGo sucks, it&#x27;s just as bad as Google&quot; is ... not the sort of complaint you normally hear about an alternative search engine, nor does it really connect with any of the normal reasons people consider alternative search engines.<p>That said, I <i>agree</i> with this point. Both DDG and Google seem to be losing the spam war, from what I can tell. And the diagnosis is a good one too: the problem with modern search engines is that they&#x27;re not opinionated &#x2F; biased <i>enough</i>!<p>&gt; Crucially, I would not have it crawling the entire web from the outset. Instead, it should crawl a whitelist of domains, or “tier 1” domains. These would be the limited mainly to authoritative or high-quality sources for their respective specializations, and would be weighed upwards in search results. Pages that these sites link to would be crawled as well, and given tier 2 status, recursively up to an arbitrary N tiers.<p>This is, obviously, very different from the modern search engine paradigm where domains are treated neutrally at the outset, and then they &quot;learn&quot; weights from how often they get linked and so on. (I&#x27;m not sure whether it&#x27;s possible to make these opinionated decisions in an open source way, but it seems like obviously the right way to go for higher quality results.) Some kind of logic like &quot;For Python programming queries, docs.python.org and then StackExchange are the tier 1 sources&quot; seems to be the kind of hard-coded information that would vastly improve my experience trying to look things up on DuckDuckGo.