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
I can turn off the horseshit firehose that we call AI, making it far better than google
I switched to it a couple of years ago, with the expectation that I had to resort to google in more complex search instances. But very soon I found out that ddg did the job, and my “alternative” google searches did not turn up anything better, quite the contrary in fact, and I haven’t been back since.
I use it for almost everything. I only resort to Google if I can’t find what I’m looking for, which is rare and typically it’s something obscure. Google has also steadily made their service worse over the years. I don’t feel like I am missing much.
Google kind of went downhill
Duckduckgo mostly uses Bing for its search results. It also uses yahoo, yandex, and it’s own crawler, but for the most part you’re getting Bing.
So what you really want to know is if Bing is just as good as Google. If you think it is, you should definitely use ddg because they’re the least intrusive.
It’s much better than Bing.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
…Oh, sorry.
Hell no. If anything, it’s gotten worse.
In their defense, however, it’s probably largely not their fault. In my admittedly one-person-sample-size experience, 90% of the searchable Web is either Reddit threads or articles, and with Reddit going officially with Google (meaning DDG doesn’t catch as many Reddit threads as they used to), that leaves most of the searchable Web being articles. Because SEO has to ruin everything.
So, it’s not really that DDG is shitty (mostly), but that all searches are shitty. Though, with the whole Google-and-Reddit thing, I find Google’s results are noticeably less shitty (though still shitty).
The killer for me has to be that it doesn’t support searching for phrases within websites I need. Latest example: github. I can be on the project page, copy a phrase from the code and search ddg with it in double quotemarks, and get 0 results. Copy - google.com - paste - enter - loads of results.
Also the search function broke for about a day, a few days ago
That’s a bit surprising, given DDG uses Bing, Bing is Microsoft and Microsoft owns Github.
Did you try the same search with Bing, or have an example to share?
To be honest with you, I didn’t even know that was a feature. (Unless I’m misunderstanding you.) Sounds cool!
If I need to search a website, I use either Ctrl+F or the
site:search engine operator.
I find it’s actually better at this point because it just gives results without AI summaries and ads, also I find it’s just straight up better at actually finding what you’re looking for
i find ddg sufficient for nearly everything. occasionally i will go to startpage or ecosia or mojeek for a different ‘perspective’, but that is not very often at all. i also use wolframalpha almost daily for some sort of calculation or conversion.
i haven’t used google or bing except by accident when using someone else’s browser or device (that is, when i forget to go to duck.com first).
Is ddg on mobile just a facade and still uses google?
So far its still less bloated
I’ve been using DDG exclusively for something like 8 years. It works great for regular text search and I use bing for image searches. I really don’t understand the reluctance of people to switch to it. To me, Google has been borderline unusable garbage for a long time.
DDG is slow. Like noticeably slower than other search engines. I have been using DDG exclusively for 2 months at this point and it is wild how much faster brave search is not even mentioning google search.
I used it for a few years, realized that I had to use bangs every other search, and reluctantly switched back to Google. But now Google is way worse than it was, so I think I might as well try switching back again, see how it feels now.
Same here, although I don’t know how long I’ve been on DDG exactly. I never not find what I’m looking for.
Cherry on the shit sundae was a couple months ago when Google started to require JavaScript be enabled for search.
Okay, so this wasn’t just me! I installed NoScript for Chrome on my work laptop as a stop gap for no more ublock origin and thought something was fishy w/ Google’s search page.
I just realized the other day that I haven’t typed
!gin months.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.
76% of their Q2 2024 revenue came from adverts. I’d rather pay with capitalist-consumerist shit on my screen than pay with money, but as everyone knows it’s far too invasive rn. Ergo, I use uBlock, sponsorblock and I don’t care about cookies.
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 switched from DDG to ecosia because of Lemmy and i gotta say it’s even better
Private browsing We protect your data and privacy so you can surf safely
This true?
Yeah I think I’m headed in this direction. I’ve also been thinking about one of them self-hostable search engines a lot
Not really. If you focus purely on just searching, yeah DDG is decent. But, I find its maps inferior and trying to find answers to some questions can get tedious. DDG I guess is just for people who want guilt-free searching.
ddg maps is just a no-frills apple maps.
which is to say: terrible
yes, it is. but between it and graphhopper (or osm), it’s “enough” for me.
i don’t need a feature-filled “app” (my phone is ‘dumb’), and the only time i end up on something else like bing or google maps is if a site i need to use embeds and relies upon them.
Agreed. Even if it were identical to Google maps in terms of content, it runs slower on all platforms I’ve so far tried (windows, iOS, OSX).
DDG is just Bing
Sorta not really.
the bulk of its search results come from bing. only its instant answers and ai features aren’t bing
I got identical results with a side-by-side comparison.
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.
Mullvad has recently made their google search proxy free for everyone. It’s a good alternative to startpage: https://leta.mullvad.net/
I like startpage more still. Mullvad’s ui sucks.
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”
Wow this is way cleaner than google. Just straight text search results for the most part.
