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Using Google whilst Duck Duck Go is down. How long has Google been this bad?

So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It's been some years.

I just can't believe how poor it's results are, and how it's trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).

I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I'm wrong.

How long has Google been this bad?

167 comments

  • For many years now, almost the only way to find tech-related answers was to add the word "reddit" to your search. Before the Rexodus ofc.

    Nowadays a lot of people go straight to where they wanted to find info - Wikipedia, StackOverflow, IMDB, etc. - and search from there.

    Google itself has admitted how bad it has gotten, and in response they decided to voluntarily reduce their profits and return everything back to when it all worked... - no I'm just kidding, they said wait a bit and AI will save us all, somehow (from ourselves?).

    • Nowadays a lot of people go straight to where they wanted to find info - Wikipedia, StackOverflow, IMDB, etc. - and search from there.

      Didn't people always do this, though? If I want to find something on Wikipedia, why wouldn't I search on Wikipedia for it? I have Firefox configured so that it searches Wikipedia when I type "wiki" then a space then the search query.

      • Okay but do you also do that for StackOverflow? And if so, then also for IMDB, and everything else? Google invested heavy effort to get people to not even remember or bookmark URLs - simply type "Wikipedia" into the bar and it would do a quick search to translate that into something, perhaps https://www.wikipedia.org/ or even https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Later, browsers started allowing other ways like searching through your locally stored bookmarks, but that doesn't change how Google pushed heavily and first towards being your one-stop place to find what you want just by thinking about it and typing a word or two. Their summaries of movies I find far superior to IMDB, and even to Wikipedia, if all I want is like the most famous movie or two from a particular actor/actress to think - "oh, that's where I know them from!"

        You resisted that trend, which was inefficient, and introduced another dependency of Google to something that did not need it in the chain of finding results that you expected to be found on Wikipedia, so good on you. But not everyone did that.

        Likewise, adding "Reddit" to a query added another purpose: if you knew you wanted a search result from Reddit specifically, then finding it via Google was far easier than trying to use Reddit's internal search, which remains extremely poorly implemented. A lot of places use Google searches internally, and if not then they rely on Google externally, to help find content in them. And why not, bc Google "wasn't evil", unlike e.g. Microsoft or questionably (at the time) Apple? So bc everything tied back to Google regardless, why not get the full Google experience? Or so I imagine the thinking went.

        But no, I don't think "people" meaning "everyone" already went straight to where they wanted to search, and even those of us who did (I also most often went straight to Wikipedia, depending on what I was searching for, bc it has fairly good internal search capabilities) did not do it for everything or even perhaps for most things - the latter measured as width of categorizations as in breadth of variety of info - even if not numerically as in "most searches performed". Google was extremely prominent and central for most people, especially those who did not think about how prominent and central it had become.

      • Nope. People Google everything. Want to visit Amazon? Most people Google Amazon to get there. URL bars that search are handy but likely emphasize this behavior.

  • I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are

    Interesting, as the incredibly poor results are why I am still not using DDG. It's like a worse Bing, and Bing is already terrible.

    You are btw correct that Google results have gotten worse. There were studies run that confirmed this. The very same studies found that Bing (and by extension ~all third-party engines) have also gotten worse, and faster so than Google. In other words, search as a whole has gone to shit, which anecdotally matches up with my repeated attempts to swap to DDG every 6-12 months that just result in learning to add !g to every single search, so I might as well skip doing that.

  • i have the opposite problem. ive aways had to go back to google becasue DDG sucks so hard.. and now i find out its because its bing-based. awesome.

    • Same here. I switched to DDG last year, but had to go back within two weeks; it was just too annoying.
      Google search results have indeed gotten pretty bad, but I've yet to see anyone surpass them.

  • Hahaha, I ~just came after a search using g**gle due to ddgo being down, I noticed the "web" search is no longer the default (as it was discussed some days ago here).

    Google seems to have a huge grip on people and they don't seem to notice (or act against) the terrible services of google search..

  • I've been trying to get used to DDG recently and while I've definitely noticed the decline of Google, that decline has been subtle for me, it hasn't become a disaster, it's just generally frustrating and just not as good as it used to be. But that said, I haven't exactly loved DDG in comparison. It's okay, definitely works, recent outage excepted, but I often found the results kind of needed more work to make use of, they were more kind of, on the topic of what I asked for rather than specifically what I asked within the domain of that topic. It's more like using a search engine as one would have done some 15 or so years ago. Often if trying to find something out I'd be disappointed by the non specific or irrelevant results and get suspicious and try changing back to google for the same thing and found that though they largely contained the same results, Google would have one or two that DDG didn't which were closer to the top of the results and were more specifically about my precise query than just the general topic. I think these tend to be things like forum posts where, if my query is a question, someone's asked basically that exact or very similar question.

    I think DDG is mostly working ok enough for me that I'll persevere but I can't say it's been better.

    • I found that switch DDG to my default was good enough for ~80% of my searches. I'll only use Google as an alternative for shopping since that's where DDG legitimately just sucks at providing anything that's not "temu" or alibaba.

  • ^This is for anyone who doesn't know, click on the web button in the "More" drop down list after making a search to get the old style search results instead of the new ones. People mentioned this in the thread earlier so I thought I'd make it clear.

  • It might be my localization, but it doesn't seem that bad to me, and I generally use duckduckgo. But forced localization is enough.

  • I‘m using searx.be most of the time. Safari wont allow it so I got confronted with ddg being down today. Still only use google if something is unfindable (mostly niche computer stuff).

167 comments