this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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DuckDuckGo has great results IMO
DDG is my default search engine but there are some types of searches that it's not good at yet, so I find myself often toggling between the two after I see that DDGs response isn't going to cut it.
Earlier today I was searching for a really specific Python error message and google had zero results. I tried Yandex and got the correct result on the first response.
Each search engine seems to be optimizing for a certain type of query and answer.
Ive started going to chatgpt to help me out with errors i dont understand and google hasnt helped with
Same, it helps with a lot of issues and even skips the part where people are questioning why you even want to know that and how you're doing it the wrong way and should do their way
Yesssss, me too. And often it gets to the right response on the first try which is the ultimate timesaver. This is why Google may be toast unless they can figure out how to integrate this.
The only caveat is that sometimes Chatgpt just hallucinates an answer or it's incomplete, so you need a bit more dead reckoning to make sure you're going the right way.
DDG mostly gets its results from bing
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
True, but they also have their own crawler. Bing is also very bad for privacy.
I liked them well enough, but recently is it just me or it seems like every time I reload a search by simply going back to the page, the ranking of the results immediately changes?
That is supper annoying to me, as now I can't keep track of the results I opened easily
This happens sometimes if you search for a new non-cached search phrase. It'll give you a couple pages, then update it's index and when you go back you're on the updated index.
Interesting, but how come it never did that before? Did I just not notice?
I don't know. I've noticed it happening for the last few months. Maybe they have the ability to update caches faster now and want to give the most fresh results. It can be irritating if you're like me and like to click a result and then go back and open a bunch of results in new tabs.
Sounds plausible yeah, so I haven't gone crazy haha, it really is annoying since usually the new results are also worse than the first batch in my experience. Guess I'll just pick up the habit of opening everything in a new tab from the get go
FWIW I thought the same. Seems like every search engine turns to doo with time.
Would be a great moment for a great open source search engine to take everyone by storm, well, like that's ever gonna happen...
I feel like that would be more easily gameable. SearXNG relies on results from other engines and there's this one distributed one that's apparently basically useless for most searches. Do with that info what you will. ~Nai
My wish would be for a free search engine, not a meta search engine, but it doesn't seem like there is much interest for that, mainly because it highly demanding in terms of complexity, but most importantly resources to run it.
I'm sorry, what does that mean?
If the algorithm is made open source, it'll likely be even easier for spammers to exploit it to spam SEO crap. ~Nai
I kind of doubt that they would optimize for an underdog in the search engine space, they'd be spending money on something fundamentally unprofitable, also because there's going to be a high overlap between the users of such an engine and those who would use an ad/content blocker
I find DDG has the same garbage AI generated content as Google. Also, search operators have been broken on DDG for years
Search operators? Quotes and dashes?
I tried them last year, but I kept not getting what I wanted compared to Google. Will have to try again.
Try SearX