Not because DDG got better, but just because google got worse.
google is still better for site-specific searches, and google scholar still has minimal AI slop
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“just as good”? No, I feel it is (and has been for years) vastly superior but I mostly use it to find documentation or Stack Overflow answers so consistent UI and concise summaries are high priority to me. Take that as you will
I don’t think anybody can dethrone Google Maps yet but that’s another story
I still haven’t found Google to be worse than Bing yet.
I don’t think anybody can dethrone Google Maps
I wonder how the whole “AI is more important than copyright” thing could play into this… Someone could totally program an “AI” map assistant right?
DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won’t have to switch engines soon.
Wait 'til you learn that DDG’s engine is Bing
DuckDuckGo AKA Bing is complete dog doo. When you are looking for news it only tries to shove in the Microsoft MSN news page. The algorithm manipulation in favor of Western MSM bias is even heavier than Google. When you search certain terms it refuses to show articles containing those exact terms.
So far its still less bloated
My thought always was that DDG was good to set as my default, and if I’m not happy with the results then it’s not a big deal to use Google once in awhile.
Just use start page instead for Google results. That’s what I do.
Yo, startpage looks sick. I’ll have to poke around and see if I can find more info on that it looks super useful. My quick test just now was “cloture 2025” which returned 4 news articles followed by basically nothing but .gov links, whereas Google returns way more “news”
100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010
Google is mostly adverts. Wouldn’t take much to be better than that.
I finally left Google a month or so ago and its amazing how little I miss it.
Yeah. I search for things all the time. Thousands of searches each month. I thought I’d miss it a lot, but I’ve not used Google for two years or so and it’s not really a problem.
Eyeing the replies, does not one other person here get results constantly flooded with content farms? They’ve gotten significantly worse
But then, I don’t use Google so maybe this is still better than Google Search?
It started maybe three years ago, around the same time as LLMs became usable for this, but I’m pretty sure >50% are human-written still. Probably the LLM generates the structure (saves any time they’d have to spend coming up with plausible-sounding texts) and someone from a low-income country is contracted to make it look more legit
Of course, queries for topics that have a Wikipedia page get Wikipedia first, recipes get tons of big-name recipe sites, products get stores. But when there’s no obvious market around a topic, 3~4 out of 5 results are content farms pretending to have useful information to show unwary visitors ads
(As an alternative, I still have to try Kagi properly. It seemed on par with DDG when I did a few searches last year, but then their payment processor refused me trying to load my account, support was unhelpful, and I’ve gotten sidetracked since)
The other annoying thing is the air summaries. I’ve disable AI features but that’s still on. I hate it so much
The problem with DDG is that when it doesnt find much it simply throws random shit at you. It’s infuriating.
DDG sold out, very focused “bubble” results that they initally railed against.
Google kind of went downhill
Good enough for me, although there are times I need to use google.
Don’t you mean DuckDuckBing ?
I just typed “african mouse” into both bing, and ddg. I got EXACTLY the same results. Which I kind of expected . Same order, everything. However, my understanding is, that DDG obfuscates the user, and doesn’t track. This is my hope, and why I use it.
No. DDG still puts less priority in small blogs over Reddit posts. All bigger search engines put way too much stock & rank in corpo social media.
I really agree Google just took themself out of the market. I wouldn’t be surprised if they dropped their “search” product completely, the way they’ve dropped a lot of other good products along the way.
