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
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 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.
I’ve never forgiven them for getting rid of their search within results, that was brilliant
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)
The other annoying thing is the air summaries. I’ve disable AI features but that’s still on. I hate it so much
On ddg? Only one or two, which I can filter out.
Google always will return a content farm though.
I also get those content farms constantly. I don’t want to use google but lately I’ve been using it over duckduckgo more often.
The problem with DDG is that when it doesnt find much it simply throws random shit at you. It’s infuriating.
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.
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.
You seriously can’t type whatever dae means?
I can. Be nice and I might.
Creep
If you wish to be understood, choose your words more carefully. If you wish to be treated with kindness, drop the defensiveness, learn to process feedback objectively, and take communication seriously. No one is being unkind or unreasonable here, except you.
That initial comment is quite pointed…
Yours is pretty over the top as well, lol.
“No one knows what the heck dae means you lazy bum. We invented words for a reason, try using them. If you’re illiterate then maybe try a YouTube video essay. “
If someone said that, sure… but no one did. Perhaps the Original Poster needs to take communication more seriously and less personally.
I think you’re making a significant deal out of something that is quite minor, personally. It’s okay, though. It’s minor, so we can agree to disagree. Cheers!
The basics of human communication is nothing important at all. 🤡
It’s an abbreviation on the internet. Do you act this way any time you see TIL, wtf, eli5 or other. Or are you just sour you don’t know this one
Chill out, man. This isn’t parliament. Everything doesn’t have to be communicated as if we’re drafting laws.
Communication styles vary greatly, and tone is dependent on setting. What OP posted was completely fine. No need to throw around clown emoji 😝
Never saw that abbreviation before, but my assumption is it’s “does anyone else” since I can’t think of anything else that’d make sense in this context
Yes, that’s accurate. My point is that typing that out isn’t hard and opens the post up to all who know English.
I’ve been online for almost thirty years and have never - knowingly - seen “dae” as an abbreviation.
I don’t believe you. DAE has been an extremely common abbreviation for well over a decade at least.
TIL I’m a liar…
I didn’t say you lied, just saying that there’s no way you’ve been on the internet for 30 years and have never seen DAE anywhere before now.
Well now you have two people you are calling liars.
Maybe, and hear me out: you’re wrong.
You seem like a young man so that’s not something anyone has told you before, so what I would recommend is reaching out and finding a stable position to hold on to for 30-60 seconds. once you’ve recovered, your brain will automatically go to work trying to find out why you’re actually right, actually, like for real. Suppress that feeling for a moment and accept that yes, your life experience is different from others. And then find a nice therapist because let’s be honest after that shock to your system you’ll need one.
You people are so intent on projecting the idea that I’m calling you liars despite the fact that I never once said nor implied you were liars, that yeah, I’m going to just go ahead and say youre fucking liars now. Have a good day.
I didn’t say you lied, just saying that there’s no way you’ve been on the internet for 30 years and have never seen DAE anywhere before now.
“I’m not saying you lied, I’m just saying the thing you stayed as fact is clearly a falsehood aka lie”
This is the second “you’re wrong” in a day, I hope your evidently fragile ego can handle it.
DAE is a fairly common acronym on online forums, often used in titles such as these. You could have used Google (or DuckDuckGo) to learn its meaning 😊
It’s simply “does anyone else.”
I did, my comment stands
It’s clearly not that common.
“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 still haven’t found Google to be worse than Bing yet.
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?
Google kind of went downhill
Kind of? It went Paul Rudd in Mac and Me.
I like DDG a lot more, especially because of the bang shortcuts. But I transitioned recently to Qwant. It also has bang shortcuts and is hosted in Europe.
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.
For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.
I love DDG AI
Just dont use ChatGPT but one of the other models. I find LLama to work fine.
Wha… Why? Why gpt the only baddy?
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
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.
Does their ‘anonymizing queries’ feat mean anything if they don’t disclose how it works or what that even means literally?
At least with the open source models the data is not sent to the big bad tech cooperations afaik
“Trust me bro”
Google is almost unusable for me even with ad block. I’ve been using DDG for the last 3 or so years now.
Better.
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.
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.
I use QWANT but I have the same feeling tbh. Or maybe Google search has been worsening I’m not too sure…
