> Luckily, there is duckduckgo. However, I have to admit, the search results of duckduckgo are by far inferior to what Google used to give.
For cases where DuckDuckGo isn't quite enough, I usually rely on StartPage [1]. It uses results from Google, but like DuckDuckGo it doesn't track its users.
Startpage, like DuckDuckGo, also works well in Lynx (I've just tested in Lynx 2.8.9 on Ubuntu 16.04).
Additionally, you can get StartPage results right from within DuckDuckGo by just appending the !sp shortcut to your search query [2]
Edit: you may want to keep in mind, however, that StartPage is now owned by an advertising company. Some users took issue with that. Personally, I'm OK with that as long as users are not being tracked. Relevant HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577
DDG's results are very bad still, and they will likely always be terrible. It's not hard to find a query that is objectively much worse than what Google has. DuckDuckGo will never be able to catch up to Google's search quality results. It doesn't have Google's data, Google relies on the search behavior of most of the people of the internet to guide its results along with its vast human and hardware resources to create results that even Microsoft can't match.
From my view, I think it must depend on your use case and common searches. I've been using DDG for years now without any major qualms on search results. For my purposes it finds what I need, and for the few cases where it doesn't (perhaps 1 out of 50 searches?) it's easy enough to just add on a !g to my query to use Google instead.
Every time I do the !g anymore, I never find Google has any better results. Usually, I just get 32,000,000 more results listed that are just auto-generated junk. Most of those don't even have the words in them that I searched for, so I don't understand how they come up.
Googles results are getting steadily shittier, so they're a bad benchmark to beat.
The behavior based searching is crap which has been usurped by people seeking profits. Optimizing the dopamine feed of users and ad impressions of publishers isn't a good thing or something to aspire to.
For cases where DuckDuckGo isn't quite enough, I usually rely on StartPage [1]. It uses results from Google, but like DuckDuckGo it doesn't track its users.
Startpage, like DuckDuckGo, also works well in Lynx (I've just tested in Lynx 2.8.9 on Ubuntu 16.04).
Additionally, you can get StartPage results right from within DuckDuckGo by just appending the !sp shortcut to your search query [2]
Edit: you may want to keep in mind, however, that StartPage is now owned by an advertising company. Some users took issue with that. Personally, I'm OK with that as long as users are not being tracked. Relevant HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577
[1] https://www.startpage.com/
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Online+Services&sc=Search