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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[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 13 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours 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

[–] synicalx@lemm.ee 1 points 20 hours ago

+1, it’s hot garbage and I don’t know why anyone would use it. You’re better off trying to randomly guess the URL of the content your looking for because that’s probably more likely to find it.

[–] match@pawb.social 15 points 22 hours 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 17 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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[–] 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 23 hours ago (3 children)

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

[–] scytale@lemm.ee 7 points 20 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 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

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

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 1 points 17 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 18 hours ago

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

[–] 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 17 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?

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I still haven't found Google to be worse than Bing yet.

[–] nullPointer@programming.dev 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 17 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 22 hours ago

Last time I checked, it matched Bing results exactly.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 2 points 17 hours ago

Yahoo is Bing too

[–] 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

[–] slomosapien@lemmy.ml 7 points 23 hours ago

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

[–] boreal@lemm.ee 4 points 22 hours 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.

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

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

[–] crazyminner@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Bangs, used to move the search to another site, in this case google

[–] sanderium@lemmy.zip 4 points 23 hours 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 21 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 (1 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.

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

It still kinda does, since it's Bing under the hood.

[–] 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

[–] tfm@europe.pub 2 points 1 day ago

For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.

[–] MakingWork@lemmy.ca -1 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] d3m0nr4v3r@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Just dont use ChatGPT but one of the other models. I find LLama to work fine.

[–] tisktisk@piefed.social 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wha... Why? Why gpt the only baddy?

[–] d3m0nr4v3r@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 23 hours ago

Well afaik they host their open source models them selves / with a cloud service they have control over so no data going to big bad tech

[–] Fiction@lemm.ee 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah, I trust DuckDuckGo. And I like they anonymize my AI queries. I feel like it’s the next best thing to running it locally.

[–] tisktisk@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Does their 'anonymizing queries' feat mean anything if they don't disclose how it works or what that even means literally?

[–] d3m0nr4v3r@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 23 hours ago

At least with the open source models the data is not sent to the big bad tech cooperations afaik

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 1 points 23 hours ago

"Trust me bro"

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