DAE feel like DuckDuckGo is now just as good as google for the vast majority of searches?
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 feel like its better than google. I switched to DDG a couple years ago. 6 months ago I did a trial run with a self hosted search that only used google as a back end, the results felt like garbage
I do not think so in my experience. I'm a software developer and a lot of my job is searching solutions to problems. Every year or two I'll try DDG because I love the concept but it never works as well for me. Putting the same search query into Google yeilds actual results for me more often than DDG does.
I use QWANT but I have the same feeling tbh. Or maybe Google search has been worsening I'm not too sure..
I've switched away from DDG after many years of use. I have gone to Ghostery Private search. It seems to be better for my search results with a lot less garbage mixed in.
Yes, mostly, except that programming related searches have really gone downhill in DDG for me.
Compared to a few years ago, it’s better. Some websites still aren’t indexed, and even by entering their name exactly, they don’t show. Google doesn’t have this problem.
Brave search is also pretty good
It’s just as good as 2008 google, which is all I want.
Good enough for me, although there are times I need to use google.
Yes, I switched back in 2023 and noticed it was already better than google.
All major search engines feel like they're either filled with AI slop results, or just only returning major corporations' sites anymore, though. DDG just falls into the latter, while Google is mostly the former.
I like DDG a lot more, especially because of the bang shortcuts. But I transitioned recently to Qwant. It also has bang shortcuts and is hosted in Europe.
I've been using DDG since 2016 and never felt it was worse in terms of "search quality" than Google.
Especially nowadays I hear friends whine near weekly about Google, but it's still somehow "better than DDG".
Honestly people just make excuses not to change what they're use to. Even if what they're used to has changed around them for the worse.
My only real complain I have is I wish 'search by date range' was less finicky use and also worked in the image tab like it does in Google images.
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.
Naw. I use Kagi (paid) now, and get much better search results.
It's my primary but Google unfortunately is often a fallback. And Google is tracking the shit out of us these days. Certain obscure searches don't work well on DDG, sad to say.
ive been using it consistently for the past few years. it works well for me, but sometimes ill go to other engines just to see what they come up with, or when results are lacking. sometimes they are better, sometimes they are worse.
meaning ddg is probably good enough nowadays, at least for me.
You probably already know this, but you can use search "bangs" to search other websites from ddg.
For example, to search google, you would put !g or !google at the start of your search.
i do! it transformed my address bar, i sometimes use other engines through ddg now. its the main reason its my search provider.
Google is almost unusable for me even with ad block. I've been using DDG for the last 3 or so years now.
no. i switch to using it as my primary search engine every once in a while, just to see how it's doing. i always run into situations where i can't find the thing im looking for. maybe im just the obscure searches man
As a general purpose search engine yeah it's just as good. Google has some nice extra features which aren't too important (for example if you search UFC it shows full fight card info and results on the search page).
Where it falls behind is for more "power user " type work. I only use Google at work as it makes finding very specific results with keywords and date ranges on certain sites etc much easier.
Nowadays I use Qwant though to boycott us. It's much slower but still does the job for day to day use.
Probably so. Haven't used it much but Google has got so much worse. Being filled with adds and irrelevant results that DuckDuckgo probably is better now.
You seriously can't type whatever dae means?
DAE is a fairly common acronym on online forums, often used in titles such as these. You could have used Google (or DuckDuckGo) to learn its meaning 😊
It's simply "does anyone else."
Never saw that abbreviation before, but my assumption is it's "does anyone else" since I can't think of anything else that'd make sense in this context
It has been for several years now. I rarely use Google now, and when I do, I'm using it out of DuckDuckGo (!g)
No. I was using big for the rewards points for a long time, the results were fine. I switched to kagi for ~6 months and it was good too. Since it's a little expensive I switched to DDG to see if I noticed a difference, it's been a little worse in comparison.
I'd say the same. Google dorks work much better than DDG's filters for site-specific stuff, and generally for things like "search term" but for general searches DDG seems pretty similar.
The only things I've also had worse performance from DDG on compared to Google (in very minimal ways) has been:
And of course, there's always the !s bang to run a search through Startpage (which uses Google) if I'm not getting enough detail.
Better.
Definitely not; DDG has always been bad. However, as others have pointed out, Google is getting worse and every day. That said, it's still better than DDG, which isn't saying much.
There are no good search engines anymore. I got tired of having to add site:reddit.com to all or my searches to get actual answers, so now I've resorted to using AI and pretending that it isn't just making up half the shit it spews. Perplexity is a half decent replacement for a search engine; it's more accurate than most and it cites its sources:
Have you tried Kagi? They have their problems, but I think it's better than Google.
I found Qwant to be a bit better, but yeah. Google got so much worse over last few years
I also use Qwant but it's noticeably slower for me. Do you find the same?
Yes, it responds slower but I don't really mind it. Like it's not significantly slower from others in my case.
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.
I've never forgiven them for getting rid of their search within results, that was brilliant
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 problem with DDG is that when it doesnt find much it simply throws random shit at you. It’s infuriating.
I also get those content farms constantly. I don't want to use google but lately I've been using it over duckduckgo more often.
On ddg? Only one or two, which I can filter out.
Google always will return a content farm though.
The other annoying thing is the air summaries. I've disable AI features but that's still on. I hate it so much
I use Yandex for finding pirated or otherwise censored content.
What do people use google scholar for? Use jstor and other specific databases like arxiv
Google just got worse.
yeah honestly I've been using ddg for a very long time and while a few years ago I had to frequently !g because search sucked now google got so enshittified many times ddg feels better
I really tried, I set duckduckgo as the default for my second browser (I use it a lot) to slowly get used to it, but every time results are so bad I get mad and switch to Google especially for images
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.
DDG sold out, very focused "bubble" results that they initally railed against.
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’ve actually never tried brave search. Which is kinda funny because I started using DDG when brave came out and it was the default search engine.
What do you mean by slow though? Like just the webpage loading or the time it takes you to get good results? I’ve never noticed any load time, but I’ve always had a few tweaked content blockers running and that may affect my perspective.
Same here, although I don’t know how long I’ve been on DDG exactly. I never not find what I’m looking for.
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.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
...........Oh, sorry.
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).
I feel the same except Google is worse due to higher number of ads in results and most SEO prioritizes Google over Bing meaning more Google results are AI spam articles.
I feel the same except Google is worse due to higher number of ads in results
I generally don't see ads due to uBlock Origin. Or am I just not noticing them? Lol.
and most SEO prioritizes Google over Bing meaning more Google results are AI spam articles.
I will give you that. But I find that's the case with DDG too which is why I'm having to rely more and more on search operators like site:. I agree that it's really annoying.
Yeah I really tried with DDG, switched my phone to it for 2 months. I was using !g so often it made the whole thing pointless.
Google sucks, but right now nothing is better. This is why they’re able to push their AI bullshit results so heavily, because just like with YouTube, ultimately there is no real competition.
I agree. Monopolies/oligopolies are terrible for the consumer.
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
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.
Have been using it for 8 years now. I never felt the need to switch back honestly. Only Google thing I really love is Maps and that's it.
Gnome Maps is honestly really good!
Not everything has to be inside your browser.
Tried OpenStreetMap? Quality varies by country though
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.
"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 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?
I still haven't found Google to be worse than Bing yet.
Wow, it has been some time since I used duck duck go. On my phone I have bing for searches as it is convenient with chatGPT integration (which tbh I only use when coding, for which I have copilot now baked into VScode). On my laptop and work station I use Arc. Its sexy af and really makes a man wonder about himself. I will have to revisit DDG. I do remember enjoying it though only for enhanced privacy. Feature wise it just seemed exactly what chrome was offering
I just realized the other day that I haven't typed !g in months.
Google kind of went downhill
Kind of? It went Paul Rudd in Mac and Me.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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?
Apparently it's not. I had to search a bit on the website so unless you just want to plant trees, which is laudable, don't bother.
Yeah I think I'm headed in this direction. I've also been thinking about one of them self-hostable search engines a lot
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?
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.
Yeah saying "DDG is as good as Google" means saying that DDG is worthless garbage lol
+1, it’s hot garbage and I don’t know why anyone would use it. You’re better off trying to randomly guess the URL of the content your looking for because that’s probably more likely to find it.
So far its still less bloated
I use StartPage because it does image search, and none of the AI BS.
DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won't have to switch engines soon.
Wait 'til you learn that DDG's engine is Bing
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.
isn't it just a bing wrapper?
No and kinda yes. Duckduckgo has its own webcrawler, but also adds in results from other sources including Bing, Yahoo and others.
Last time I checked, it matched Bing results exactly.
Yahoo is Bing too
Yup.