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.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
...........Oh, sorry.
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).
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
To be honest with you, I didn't even know that was a feature. (Unless I'm misunderstanding you.) Sounds cool!
If I need to search a website, I use either Ctrl+F or the site: search engine operator.
I find it's actually better at this point because it just gives results without AI summaries and ads, also I find it's just straight up better at actually finding what you're looking for
i find ddg sufficient for nearly everything. occasionally i will go to startpage or ecosia or mojeek for a different 'perspective', but that is not very often at all. i also use wolframalpha almost daily for some sort of calculation or conversion.
i haven't used google or bing except by accident when using someone else's browser or device (that is, when i forget to go to duck.com first).
So far its still less bloated
I just realized the other day that I haven't typed !g in months.
No. DDG still puts less priority in small blogs over Reddit posts. All bigger search engines put way too much stock & rank in corpo social media.
Google is mostly adverts. Wouldn’t take much to be better than that.
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.
I finally left Google a month or so ago and its amazing how little I miss it.
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.
Same here, although I don’t know how long I’ve been on DDG exactly. I never not find what I’m looking for.
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.
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
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
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.
ddg maps is just a no-frills apple maps.
which is to say: terrible
yes, it is. but between it and graphhopper (or osm), it's "enough" for me.
i don't need a feature-filled "app" (my phone is 'dumb'), and the only time i end up on something else like bing or google maps is if a site i need to use embeds and relies upon them.
Agreed. Even if it were identical to Google maps in terms of content, it runs slower on all platforms I’ve so far tried (windows, iOS, OSX).
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.
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"
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. Mullvad’s ui sucks.
Wow this is way cleaner than google. Just straight text search results for the most part.
"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?
100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010
isn't it just a bing wrapper?
No and kinda yes. Duckduckgo has its own webcrawler, but also adds in results from other sources including Bing, Yahoo and others.
Yahoo is Bing too
Last time I checked, it matched Bing results exactly.
DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won't have to switch engines soon.
Wait 'til you learn that DDG's engine is Bing
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.
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
For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.
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