DAE feel like DuckDuckGo is now just as good as google for the vast majority of searches?

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
DDG is just Bing
- Sorta not really.

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.

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.
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.

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.

"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.

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.

i switched from DDG to ecosia because of Lemmy and i gotta say it's even better

Yeah I think I'm headed in this direction. I've also been thinking about one of them self-hostable search engines a lot
Private browsing We protect your data and privacy so you can surf safely

This true?

DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won't have to switch engines soon.

Wait 'til you learn that DDG's engine is Bing

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.

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.

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.

I just realized the other day that I haven't typed !g in months.

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

Google is mostly adverts. Wouldn’t take much to be better than that.

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 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.

I can turn off the horseshit firehose that we call AI, making it far better than google

Ironically I find ChatGPT pretty good for certain types of searching.
- For me, its only finding stuff thats really hard to google, like concepts or meme templates.

So far its still less bloated

100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010

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?

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.

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.

DDG sold out, very focused "bubble" results that they initally railed against.

I use Startpage and it feels like I always get the results I want even when I don't use perfect prompts. Just recently I got a three month free trial for Kagi and the results were better than google in my opinion, or at least less cluttered with "possibly related things" that are just ads in the end.

I switched to exclusively Kagi on my phone and it's been a pretty pleasant experience. Not perfect, but fairly serviceable. You're right, it's way less cluttered. Going back to Google can sometimes be very jarring.

Google kind of went downhill

Kind of? It went Paul Rudd in Mac and Me.

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)

On ddg? Only one or two, which I can filter out.

Google always will return a content farm though.

Better usually in my experience. Google is mostly SEO-sludge anyway. Though sometimes when you need something very specific Google is better but that gap has been pretty much closed during 7+ years I’ve used DDG.

It's not as good as google was when I was first allowed to use the internet 15+ years ago, but much better than today's google. Just so much more peace of mind to know that profit isn't what governs my search results.

It still kinda does, since it's Bing under the hood.
- :(

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.

Tried OpenStreetMap? Quality varies by country though

kagi still owns both of them. but there's also startpage and leta which are google wrappers if you don't want to use Google directly

For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.

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.

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 use StartPage because it does image search, and none of the AI BS.

I love DDG AI

Just dont use ChatGPT but one of the other models. I find LLama to work fine.
- Wha... Why? Why gpt the only baddy?
Yeah, I trust DuckDuckGo. And I like they anonymize my AI queries. I feel like it’s the next best thing to running it locally.
- Does their 'anonymizing queries' feat mean anything if they don't disclose how it works or what that even means literally?
- "Trust me bro"

I use Kagi, I really like how it's AI answer gives sources for statements.