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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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I'm out of the loop on DDG, what did they do?
Not sure on the shady part, but I have stopped using them simply because they give me the same crap as Bing. Web search is almost dead, I’ve been thinking of trying one of the paid options. I’ve read good things about kagi
i don't get this, i get perfectly fine search results with ddg..
i get finding the results slightly worse but dead? stop it with this absurd hyperbole
Depends what you're trying to do. Looking up a movie? Easy. Looking up niche documentation/issues or error codes just feels hopeless compared to how it used to be.
i mean i have no real issues finding info about various linux errors, is that not niche enough?
or have i just never seen the glory days where a google search would automatically fix your issue and bake a nice cake?
Free web search gives me a whole page of SEO pages, cached reddit content that’s been deleted when you click it, or one of like five tech giants and their crap.
Unless you are very specific and already know what site you are looking for it is extremely difficult to simply find information now, if you just want an answer you locate the relevant reddit or discord community and try your luck there, or ask a LLM to give you an answer because you can’t wade through the sheer amount of non- and disinformation out there now.
Of course, the LLM is also trained on this bullshit and not actually smart, so at best you get an idea where you can look for the information it regurgitated if you make it cite its sources, and do your own research from there.
Are you really telling me this is somehow not much much worse than mid 2000s-2010s internet, where you typed something into google and it almost always found that exact thing you were looking for?
Surely anecdotal, but I have never clicked on a Google Reddit link that didn’t let me to an actual post, most of the time with the actual info I was hoping to find and never have I been served SEO pages.
There was a slight influx of AI generated nonsense a couple months back but that stopped. On my iPhone i Use DuckDuckGo and an perfectly happy. On the Mac where I have more ways to block stuff I use google and also don’t have any issues.
May I ask what kind of things you usually search for?
I'm still using it but it was fun when they had something along the lines of "your privacy is safe with us. Also, wanna leave your email?" 😅
I am thinking of migrating to Kagi now, because search in DDG is often meh
A long ago they had drama for apparently leaking user information to microsoft— but that was a while ago. Really they were accused of having biased results.
[Edited by the commenter to remove incorrect information, see below.] I'm not sure if anything else has come up since then though, and I've continued using DDG, just not for any sort of news or information on current events. I mainly use a search engine for dev stuff anyways.
I think rather than either or, it just ranks things differently and doesn't give the best results.
I also remember during the height of COVID, antivax people were saying to use DDG because their random blogs and conspiracy YouTube videos were closer to the top compared to google.
Do you have a source for that?
Apart from that, the results are often pretty terrible unless you use the exact terms from whatever page you're trying to find. I've also seen a lot of people stating that search results keep changing every time they refresh the page as well.