this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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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

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[–] lucg@lemmy.world 7 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

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)

[–] inconspicuouscolon@lemy.lol 1 points 10 hours ago

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.

[–] Niquarl@lemmy.ml 1 points 12 hours ago

The other annoying thing is the air summaries. I've disable AI features but that's still on. I hate it so much

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 2 points 14 hours ago

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

Google always will return a content farm though.

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[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago

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

[–] ByGourou@sh.itjust.works 9 points 18 hours ago

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

[–] shaggyb@lemmy.world 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Ironically I find ChatGPT pretty good for certain types of searching.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

For me, its only finding stuff thats really hard to google, like concepts or meme templates.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

ChatGPT is great for when what you're looking for is the proper search term.
If I don't know what term to google, I can describe what I'm looking for and then nudge the bot in the right direction till it spits out the term.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 2 points 12 hours ago

Exactly! If I don't exactly know what I'm trying to find, its useful.

[–] Tungsten5@lemm.ee 1 points 13 hours ago

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

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth 5 points 23 hours ago

It's much better than Bing.

[–] yata@sh.itjust.works 4 points 20 hours ago

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.

[–] EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 1 day ago (7 children)

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).

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[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 3 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 3 points 13 hours ago

Gnome Maps is honestly really good!
Not everything has to be inside your browser.

[–] lucg@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago

Tried OpenStreetMap? Quality varies by country though

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

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

[–] FRYD@sh.itjust.works 37 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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.

[–] CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.ee 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FRYD@sh.itjust.works 2 points 16 hours ago

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.

[–] serendipity@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago

Same here, although I don’t know how long I’ve been on DDG exactly. I never not find what I’m looking for.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Cherry on the shit sundae was a couple months ago when Google started to require JavaScript be enabled for search.

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[–] jaxxed@lemmy.ml 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Google kind of went downhill

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

[–] venotic@kbin.melroy.org 55 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 26 points 1 day ago (6 children)

ddg maps is just a no-frills apple maps.

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[–] Zeppo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 20 hours ago

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.

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

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

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[–] dojan@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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

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[–] ceenote@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago

So far its still less bloated

[–] JackLSauce@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"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

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[–] match@pawb.social 16 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Private browsing We protect your data and privacy so you can surf safely

This true?

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