this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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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

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[–] variouslegumes@reddthat.com 11 points 21 hours ago

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

[–] venotic@kbin.melroy.org 50 points 1 day ago (2 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.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

ddg maps is just a no-frills apple maps.

[–] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 19 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 2 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

yes, it is. but between it and graphhopper (or osm), it's "enough" for me.

i don't need a feature-filled "app" (my phone is 'dumb'), and the only time i end up on something else like bing or google maps is if a site i need to use embeds and relies upon them.

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[–] Xanthobilly@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Agreed. Even if it were identical to Google maps in terms of content, it runs slower on all platforms I’ve so far tried (windows, iOS, OSX).

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] djsaskdja@reddthat.com 2 points 23 hours ago (2 children)
[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago

I got identical results with a side-by-side comparison.

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[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.ml 7 points 19 hours ago

So far its still less bloated

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 9 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] suite403@lemmy.world 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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

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[–] Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 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.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 5 points 20 hours ago

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.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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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[–] ceenote@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

My thought always was that DDG was good to set as my default, and if I'm not happy with the results then it's not a big deal to use Google once in awhile.

[–] PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Just use start page instead for Google results. That’s what I do.

[–] scytale@lemm.ee 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Mullvad has recently made their google search proxy free for everyone. It’s a good alternative to startpage: https://leta.mullvad.net/

[–] PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I like startpage more still. Mullvad’s ui sucks.

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago

Yo, startpage looks sick. I'll have to poke around and see if I can find more info on that it looks super useful. My quick test just now was "cloture 2025" which returned 4 news articles followed by basically nothing but .gov links, whereas Google returns way more "news"

[–] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 1 points 20 hours ago

Wow this is way cleaner than google. Just straight text search results for the most part.

[–] match@pawb.social 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

i switched from DDG to ecosia because of Lemmy and i gotta say it's even better

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Yeah I think I'm headed in this direction. I've also been thinking about one of them self-hostable search engines a lot

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[–] JackLSauce@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"just as good"? No, I feel it is (and has been for years) vastly superior but I mostly use it to find documentation or Stack Overflow answers so consistent UI and concise summaries are high priority to me. Take that as you will

I don't think anybody can dethrone Google Maps yet but that's another story

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 3 points 20 hours ago

I don't think anybody can dethrone Google Maps

I wonder how the whole "AI is more important than copyright" thing could play into this... Someone could totally program an "AI" map assistant right?

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[–] Sickduck@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won't have to switch engines soon.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Wait 'til you learn that DDG's engine is Bing

[–] nullPointer@programming.dev 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

isn't it just a bing wrapper?

[–] klangcola@reddthat.com 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

No and kinda yes. Duckduckgo has its own webcrawler, but also adds in results from other sources including Bing, Yahoo and others.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Last time I checked, it matched Bing results exactly.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 2 points 19 hours ago

Yahoo is Bing too

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[–] slomosapien@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago

100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010

[–] TheRealCharlesEames@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I've had to use !g way too much lately, so no.

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[–] boreal@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago

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 I’ve used DDG.

[–] sanderium@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] franzfurdinand@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago

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.

[–] Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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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[–] breadguy@kbin.earth 3 points 1 day ago

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

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