this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
234 points (95.7% liked)

Asklemmy

46520 readers
1035 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy πŸ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 2 points 5 minutes ago

You seriously can't type whatever dae means?

[–] limoncia@lemm.ee 3 points 1 hour ago

I found Qwant to be a bit better, but yeah. Google got so much worse over last few years

[–] Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] DioEgizio@lemm.ee 2 points 1 hour ago

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

[–] Tungsten5@lemm.ee 1 points 2 hours ago

Wow, it has been some time since I used duck duck go. On my phone I have bing for searches as it is convenient with chatGPT integration (which tbh I only use when coding, for which I have copilot now baked into VScode). On my laptop and work station I use Arc. Its sexy af and really makes a man wonder about himself. I will have to revisit DDG. I do remember enjoying it though only for enhanced privacy. Feature wise it just seemed exactly what chrome was offering

[–] lucg@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

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)

[–] Niquarl@lemmy.ml 1 points 53 minutes ago

The other annoying thing is the air summaries. I've disable AI features but that's still on. I hate it so much

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 2 points 3 hours ago

On ddg? Only one or two, which I can filter out.

Google always will return a content farm though.

[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago

DDG sold out, very focused "bubble" results that they initally railed against.

[–] ByGourou@sh.itjust.works 9 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

I use StartPage because it does image search, and none of the AI BS.

[–] shaggyb@lemmy.world 8 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I can turn off the horseshit firehose that we call AI, making it far better than google

[–] cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works -1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Ironically I find ChatGPT pretty good for certain types of searching.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

For me, its only finding stuff thats really hard to google, like concepts or meme templates.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

ChatGPT is great for when what you're looking for is the proper search term.
If I don't know what term to google, I can describe what I'm looking for and then nudge the bot in the right direction till it spits out the term.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 2 points 1 hour ago

Exactly! If I don't exactly know what I'm trying to find, its useful.

[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Have been using it for 8 years now. I never felt the need to switch back honestly. Only Google thing I really love is Maps and that's it.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago

Gnome Maps is honestly really good!
Not everything has to be inside your browser.

[–] lucg@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

Tried OpenStreetMap? Quality varies by country though

[–] yata@sh.itjust.works 4 points 8 hours ago

I switched to it a couple of years ago, with the expectation that I had to resort to google in more complex search instances. But very soon I found out that ddg did the job, and my "alternative" google searches did not turn up anything better, quite the contrary in fact, and I haven't been back since.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth 4 points 12 hours ago

It's much better than Bing.

[–] Zeppo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 9 hours ago

I use it for almost everything. I only resort to Google if I can't find what I'm looking for, which is rare and typically it's something obscure. Google has also steadily made their service worse over the years. I don't feel like I am missing much.

[–] jaxxed@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Google kind of went downhill

Kind of? It went Paul Rudd in Mac and Me.

[–] EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

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 2 points 11 hours 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?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] FRYD@sh.itjust.works 34 points 22 hours ago (5 children)

I’ve been using DDG exclusively for something like 8 years. It works great for regular text search and I use bing for image searches. I really don’t understand the reluctance of people to switch to it. To me, Google has been borderline unusable garbage for a long time.

[–] CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.ee 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

DDG is slow. Like noticeably slower than other search engines. I have been using DDG exclusively for 2 months at this point and it is wild how much faster brave search is not even mentioning google search.

[–] FRYD@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 hours ago

I’ve actually never tried brave search. Which is kinda funny because I started using DDG when brave came out and it was the default search engine.

What do you mean by slow though? Like just the webpage loading or the time it takes you to get good results? I’ve never noticed any load time, but I’ve always had a few tweaked content blockers running and that may affect my perspective.

[–] serendipity@aussie.zone 3 points 14 hours ago

Same here, although I don’t know how long I’ve been on DDG exactly. I never not find what I’m looking for.

[–] 0ops@lemm.ee 1 points 12 hours ago

I used it for a few years, realized that I had to use bangs every other search, and reluctantly switched back to Google. But now Google is way worse than it was, so I think I might as well try switching back again, see how it feels now.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Silk@lemm.ee -2 points 7 hours ago

I use Kagi, I really like how it's AI answer gives sources for statements.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 7 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] variouslegumes@reddthat.com 11 points 19 hours ago

I just realized the other day that I haven't typed !g in months.

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.ml 7 points 18 hours ago

So far its still less bloated

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 9 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Google is mostly adverts. Wouldn’t take much to be better than that.

[–] suite403@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I finally left Google a month or so ago and its amazing how little I miss it.

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

Yeah. I search for things all the time. Thousands of searches each month. I thought I’d miss it a lot, but I’ve not used Google for two years or so and it’s not really a problem.

[–] Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 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.

[–] venotic@kbin.melroy.org 48 points 1 day ago (11 children)

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.

load more comments (11 replies)
load more comments
view more: next β€Ί