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.
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.
It's my primary but Google unfortunately is often a fallback. And Google is tracking the shit out of us these days. Certain obscure searches don't work well on DDG, sad to say.
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.
no. i switch to using it as my primary search engine every once in a while, just to see how it's doing. i always run into situations where i can't find the thing im looking for. maybe im just the obscure searches man
No. I was using big for the rewards points for a long time, the results were fine. I switched to kagi for ~6 months and it was good too. Since it's a little expensive I switched to DDG to see if I noticed a difference, it's been a little worse in comparison.
Probably so. Haven't used it much but Google has got so much worse. Being filled with adds and irrelevant results that DuckDuckgo probably is better now.
As a general purpose search engine yeah it's just as good. Google has some nice extra features which aren't too important (for example if you search UFC it shows full fight card info and results on the search page).
Where it falls behind is for more "power user " type work. I only use Google at work as it makes finding very specific results with keywords and date ranges on certain sites etc much easier.
Nowadays I use Qwant though to boycott us. It's much slower but still does the job for day to day use.
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.
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
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.
I'd say the same. Google dorks work much better than DDG's filters for site-specific stuff, and generally for things like "search term" but for general searches DDG seems pretty similar.
The only things I've also had worse performance from DDG on compared to Google (in very minimal ways) has been:
Highly specific searches (e.g. searching for a diagram of the dimensions of common connector types, DDG shows side-by-sides of connectors, Google does that but also with more diagrams that have dimensions in them)
Context but not keyword based searches (e.g. "thing that has x y and z characteristics" returns more relevant results in Google than DDG, very marginally)
And of course, there's always the !s bang to run a search through Startpage (which uses Google) if I'm not getting enough detail.
Definitely not; DDG has always been bad. However, as others have pointed out, Google is getting worse and every day. That said, it's still better than DDG, which isn't saying much.
There are no good search engines anymore. I got tired of having to add site:reddit.com to all or my searches to get actual answers, so now I've resorted to using AI and pretending that it isn't just making up half the shit it spews. Perplexity is a half decent replacement for a search engine; it's more accurate than most and it cites its sources:
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.
yeah honestly I've been using ddg for a very long time and while a few years ago I had to frequently !g because search sucked now google got so enshittified many times ddg feels better
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)
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
Duckduckgo mostly uses Bing for its search results. It also uses yahoo, yandex, and it's own crawler, but for the most part you're getting Bing.
So what you really want to know is if Bing is just as good as Google. If you think it is, you should definitely use ddg because they're the least intrusive.
Wow, it has been some time since I used duck duck go. On my phone I have bing for searches as it is convenient with chatGPT integration (which tbh I only use when coding, for which I have copilot now baked into VScode). On my laptop and work station I use Arc. Its sexy af and really makes a man wonder about himself. I will have to revisit DDG. I do remember enjoying it though only for enhanced privacy. Feature wise it just seemed exactly what chrome was offering
I switched to it a couple of years ago, with the expectation that I had to resort to google in more complex search instances. But very soon I found out that ddg did the job, and my "alternative" google searches did not turn up anything better, quite the contrary in fact, and I haven't been back since.
In their defense, however, it's probably largely not their fault. In my admittedly one-person-sample-size experience, 90% of the searchable Web is either Reddit threads or articles, and with Reddit going officially with Google (meaning DDG doesn't catch as many Reddit threads as they used to), that leaves most of the searchable Web being articles. Because SEO has to ruin everything.
So, it's not really that DDG is shitty (mostly), but that all searches are shitty. Though, with the whole Google-and-Reddit thing, I find Google's results are noticeably less shitty (though still shitty).
I feel the same except Google is worse due to higher number of ads in results and most SEO prioritizes Google over Bing meaning more Google results are AI spam articles.
I feel the same except Google is worse due to higher number of ads in results
I generally don't see ads due to uBlock Origin. Or am I just not noticing them? Lol.
and most SEO prioritizes Google over Bing meaning more Google results are AI spam articles.
I will give you that. But I find that's the case with DDG too which is why I'm having to rely more and more on search operators like site:. I agree that it's really annoying.
Yeah I really tried with DDG, switched my phone to it for 2 months. I was using !g so often it made the whole thing pointless.
Google sucks, but right now nothing is better. This is why they’re able to push their AI bullshit results so heavily, because just like with YouTube, ultimately there is no real competition.
The killer for me has to be that it doesn't support searching for phrases within websites I need. Latest example: github. I can be on the project page, copy a phrase from the code and search ddg with it in double quotemarks, and get 0 results. Copy - google.com - paste - enter - loads of results.
Also the search function broke for about a day, a few days ago
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.
DDG is slow. Like noticeably slower than other search engines. I have been using DDG exclusively for 2 months at this point and it is wild how much faster brave search is not even mentioning google search.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use it for almost everything. I only resort to Google if I can't find what I'm looking for, which is rare and typically it's something obscure. Google has also steadily made their service worse over the years. I don't feel like I am missing much.
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.
"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
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.
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"
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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.