Asklemmy

That's a low bar, google sucks now

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.

It’s just as good as 2008 google, which is all I want.

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

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.

Good enough for me, although there are times I need to use google.

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.

Don't you mean DuckDuckBing ?

Yes, mostly, except that programming related searches have really gone downhill in DDG for me.

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.

Naw. I use Kagi (paid) now, and get much better search results.

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.

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.

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.

You seriously can't type whatever dae means?

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

Google is almost unusable for me even with ad block. I've been using DDG for the last 3 or so years now.

It has been for several years now. I rarely use Google now, and when I do, I'm using it out of DuckDuckGo (!g)

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.

I found Qwant to be a bit better, but yeah. Google got so much worse over last few years

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)

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:

• Highly specific searches (e.g. searching for a diagram of the dimensions of common connector types, DDG shows side-by-sides of connectors, Google does that but also with more diagrams that have dimensions in them)
• Context but not keyword based searches (e.g. "thing that has x y and z characteristics" returns more relevant results in Google than DDG, very marginally)

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.