Google's been getting worse, but it's not like Bing has been getting better. Maybe it's just the way I search for things, but I can never get Bing to work.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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The problem is you have so many SEO slip makers gaming the algorithm that no one can keep up.
And most of the decent content is gated behind walled gardens now.
I use DDG, which works for about 90% of my searches, but when it doesn't work, I go back to Google, often in a private window. I do agree that Google is still just, I dunno, better?
Just use the !s bang in your ddg search. It forwards your search to startpage, a google proxy. Same results but more protection.
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Looking over their Wikipedia page, DDG looks like they're reasonably independent.
Why is everyone saying they're just Bing?
DDG gets its results from other search engines. Bing is one of them.
There was also a big thing about DDG allegedly selling user data to Microsoft, which the living brain donors of 4chan probably interpreted as DDG being a different front-end to Bing.
It wasn't exactly selling, but it also wasn't alleged. They made an exception for Microsoft's tracking scripts in their tracking script blocking settings on their phone apps and extensions in exchange for utilizing bing as a backend. Here is the blog post where they walked it back after backlash.
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My understanding is that they outsource the search part to bing's search back-end. Saying DDG is just Bing is like saying two butchers are the same because they get their meat from the same supplier.
With all due respect, I don't know enough about butchering but it sounds far less complicated than what we're talking about
Outsourcing back ends is one of the key parts of being a butcher.
Some people get paid good money for outsourcing their back end. Some also get paid for outsourcing other peoples' back ends, but that is generally frowned upon.
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There are really only two usable search engines actually indexing the entire Internet: Google and Bing. Yandex also does but I've never seen it recommended for anything other than Russian language content (the company itself seems to be falling down a mineshaft at the moment). Baidu also does some although every Chinese exchange student I talked to about it (admittedly not many) advised only using it when Google is blocked. Every other engine is just wrapping Google or Bing (yes that includes Yahoo and DDG)
This is the kind of ugly truth of the search engine business. It's a duopoly at least in part because the indicies are expensive to scrape, build, and run. You need to continuously run a large number of servers loading web pages and often running scripts. You need to be large enough to negotiate with content providers not to block you. Keep in mind paying them may bankrupt you as your margins will be thin. Google has a huge advantage here they own a good chunk of the online advertising industry and can afford to throw money around in a way a search only company wouldn't be able to (this is why the European and Canadian link tax schemes ironically cement the existing monopolies). You need to continuously run large linear aglebra transforms on the results (PageRank is expensive). You need to store all your indicies on large expensive servers with a lot of memory as hitting disk may take too long. Results need to be fast and you will make next to nothing on each search.
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Nobody else has mentioned this but there have been several times that Bing censored something and it propagated to DDG, most notably when Microsoft censored Tank Man (intended for China, probably) but then Tank Man also was censored on DDG.
Partly because of these incidents, I could never consider DDG reliable.
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I use DDG just because they have !bangs and it saves me so much time.
!yt searches YouTube !imdb searches IMDb
And so on.
I just have that in my browser. If I type y search term I get a YouTube Search page for "search term".
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DDG has the ai summary too
lite.duckduckgo.com is my default search engine. I have other more specific searches for stuff like Wikipedia and sepiasearch, and I use duckduckgo regular for shopping.
I fucking hate ai but ddg's ai summary is the one place I don't mind it. It doesn't open unless I click it, and I only click it when I don't actually give a shit about the correctness of something. It's great for throwaway factoids that you're curious about in the moment but won't remember or care about an hour later lol. Often saves me from wasting time going down a wikipedia rabbithole when I need to be doing something else
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yeah idk what theyre talking about
DDG at least has a setting to disable it and I believe a separate URL if you don't wanna use an account or cookies to save the setting
Thats honestly why I use Qwant. They're from europe (France) and even tho they still rely on Bing they are working with Ecosia to build their own independent european search index
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I use Ecosia. There's just a regular setting to turn the AI thing off. It's like 1 of 5 settings they have in total.
No they're building their own open european search index currently with Qwant
ddg has always been bing, but it's always been pointless pointing. They laugh at maga, though, and wonder about sheep.
DDG is not bing. using bing's index and being bing are two different things, and by the way, I'd use bing over Google's shitty ass shit every day.
in bings credit, it gave me the archive links to rock band 4s removed content for uhh... file existance purposes that google outirght scrubs out.
They could use Google as far as I'm concerned. From a privacy perspective if 1 million people are proxied through DDG, Google won't be able to collect any personal data as long as DDG can be trusted with their security. And as far as I'm concerned they can be.
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Does Bing not work? Because DDG gets results for me
At least as good as google. The belief that google is a better search engine is antiquated, based on a situation that no longer exists. Google has long since fallen to ad algorithms and bloat.
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Didnt DDG get in trouble for selling/tracking user data without telling anyone? Or was that Brave Browser? Maybe it was both, I don't remember...
EDIT: Both. DDG made a deal to sell tracker data to Microsoft, and Brave Browser sold user data for AI training.
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There are other options, qwant, ecosia…
Vague... they're going to gouge their eyes out or they're going to become oedipus and fuck their own mom?
Ok fine, point me to where I should be searching?
I mostly try to find something on Wikipedia first whenever I can (surprisingly often) and go from there.
They currently use Google and Bing however the ad money goes towards things like planting trees and:
The internet just got better: our European search index goes live
https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/
They are slowly building their own search index
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