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

  • venotic@kbin.melroy.org
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    17 hours 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.

  • slomosapien@lemmy.ml
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    15 hours ago

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

  • toastal@lemmy.ml
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    9 hours ago

    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.

  • JackLSauce@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    “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

    • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      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?

  • breadguy@kbin.earth
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    17 hours ago

    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

  • sanderium@lemmy.zip
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    14 hours ago

    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.

    • franzfurdinand@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      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.

  • tfm@europe.pub
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    16 hours ago

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

  • EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 hours ago

    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).

    • Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 hours ago

      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

      • flux@lemmy.ml
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        1 hour 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?

      • EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 hours ago

        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.

    • Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 hours ago

      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.

  • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 hours ago

    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.

  • ceenote@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    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.