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
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.
Cherry on the shit sundae was a couple months ago when Google started to require JavaScript be enabled for search.
Okay, so this wasn’t just me! I installed NoScript for Chrome on my work laptop as a stop gap for no more ublock origin and thought something was fishy w/ Google’s search page.
Stop using Chrome too
deleted by creator
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.
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.
ive been using it consistently for the past few years. it works well for me, but sometimes ill go to other engines just to see what they come up with, or when results are lacking. sometimes they are better, sometimes they are worse.
meaning ddg is probably good enough nowadays, at least for me.
You probably already know this, but you can use search “bangs” to search other websites from ddg.
For example, to search google, you would put !g or !google at the start of your search.
i do! it transformed my address bar, i sometimes use other engines through ddg now. its the main reason its my search provider.
“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
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?
I still haven’t found Google to be worse than Bing yet.
i switched from DDG to ecosia because of Lemmy and i gotta say it’s even better
Yeah I think I’m headed in this direction. I’ve also been thinking about one of them self-hostable search engines a lot
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.
Just use start page instead for Google results. That’s what I do.
Mullvad has recently made their google search proxy free for everyone. It’s a good alternative to startpage: https://leta.mullvad.net/
I like startpage more still
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”
100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010
I’ve been using DDG since 2016 and never felt it was worse in terms of “search quality” than Google.
Especially nowadays I hear friends whine near weekly about Google, but it’s still somehow “better than DDG”.
Honestly people just make excuses not to change what they’re use to. Even if what they’re used to has changed around them for the worse.
My only real complain I have is I wish ‘search by date range’ was less finicky use and also worked in the image tab like it does in Google images.
It’s just as good as 2008 google, which is all I want.
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
Yes, I switched back in 2023 and noticed it was already better than google.
All major search engines feel like they’re either filled with AI slop results, or just only returning major corporations’ sites anymore, though. DDG just falls into the latter, while Google is mostly the former.
I can turn off the horseshit firehose that we call AI, making it far better than google
Ironically I find ChatGPT pretty good for certain types of searching.
For me, its only finding stuff thats really hard to google, like concepts or meme templates.
Don’t you mean DuckDuckBing ?
I just typed “african mouse” into both bing, and ddg. I got EXACTLY the same results. Which I kind of expected . Same order, everything. However, my understanding is, that DDG obfuscates the user, and doesn’t track. This is my hope, and why I use it.
I found Qwant to be a bit better, but yeah. Google got so much worse over last few years
I’ve had to use !g way too much lately, so no.
Whats that do?
Bangs, used to move the search to another site, in this case google
Google is mostly adverts. Wouldn’t take much to be better than that.
I finally left Google a month or so ago and its amazing how little I miss it.
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.
