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I've been using DDG since 2016 and never felt it was worse in terms of "search quality" than Google.
Especially nowadays I hear friends whine near weekly about Google, but it's still somehow "better than DDG".
Honestly people just make excuses not to change what they're use to. Even if what they're used to has changed around them for the worse.
My only real complain I have is I wish 'search by date range' was less finicky use and also worked in the image tab like it does in Google images.
Better.
Don't you mean DuckDuckBing ?
As a general purpose search engine yeah it's just as good. Google has some nice extra features which aren't too important (for example if you search UFC it shows full fight card info and results on the search page).
Where it falls behind is for more "power user " type work. I only use Google at work as it makes finding very specific results with keywords and date ranges on certain sites etc much easier.
Nowadays I use Qwant though to boycott us. It's much slower but still does the job for day to day use.
It has been for several years now. I rarely use Google now, and when I do, I'm using it out of DuckDuckGo (!g)
ive been using it consistently for the past few years. it works well for me, but sometimes ill go to other engines just to see what they come up with, or when results are lacking. sometimes they are better, sometimes they are worse.
meaning ddg is probably good enough nowadays, at least for me.
You probably already know this, but you can use search "bangs" to search other websites from ddg.
For example, to search google, you would put !g or !google at the start of your search.
i do! it transformed my address bar, i sometimes use other engines through ddg now. its the main reason its my search provider.
I'd say the same. Google dorks work much better than DDG's filters for site-specific stuff, and generally for things like "search term" but for general searches DDG seems pretty similar.
The only things I've also had worse performance from DDG on compared to Google (in very minimal ways) has been:
And of course, there's always the !s bang to run a search through Startpage (which uses Google) if I'm not getting enough detail.
You seriously can't type whatever dae means?
Iβve been online for almost thirty years and have never - knowingly - seen βdaeβ as an abbreviation.
DAE is a fairly common acronym on online forums, often used in titles such as these. You could have used Google (or DuckDuckGo) to learn its meaning π
It's simply "does anyone else."
Never saw that abbreviation before, but my assumption is it's "does anyone else" since I can't think of anything else that'd make sense in this context
What do people use google scholar for? Use jstor and other specific databases like arxiv
Definitely not; DDG has always been bad. However, as others have pointed out, Google is getting worse and every day. That said, it's still better than DDG, which isn't saying much.
There are no good search engines anymore. I got tired of having to add site:reddit.com to all or my searches to get actual answers, so now I've resorted to using AI and pretending that it isn't just making up half the shit it spews. Perplexity is a half decent replacement for a search engine; it's more accurate than most and it cites its sources:
Have you tried Kagi? They have their problems, but I think it's better than Google.
Google just got worse.
I use Yandex for finding pirated or otherwise censored content.
I found Qwant to be a bit better, but yeah. Google got so much worse over last few years
I also use Qwant but it's noticeably slower for me. Do you find the same?
I really agree Google just took themself out of the market. I wouldn't be surprised if they dropped their "search" product completely, the way they've dropped a lot of other good products along the way.
I've never forgiven them for getting rid of their search within results, that was brilliant
yeah honestly I've been using ddg for a very long time and while a few years ago I had to frequently !g because search sucked now google got so enshittified many times ddg feels better
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)
The problem with DDG is that when it doesnt find much it simply throws random shit at you. Itβs infuriating.
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.
The other annoying thing is the air summaries. I've disable AI features but that's still on. I hate it so much
On ddg? Only one or two, which I can filter out.
Google always will return a content farm though.
DDG sold out, very focused "bubble" results that they initally railed against.
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