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
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Asklemmy
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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 from DDG to ecosia because of Lemmy and i gotta say it's even better
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This true?
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Yeah I think I'm headed in this direction. I've also been thinking about one of them self-hostable search engines a lot
So far its still less bloated
DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won't have to switch engines soon.
Wait 'til you learn that DDG's engine is Bing
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.
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
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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
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100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010
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 Iโve used DDG.
I use Kagi, I really like how it's AI answer gives sources for statements.
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.
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.
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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