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
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.
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.
my problem with apple maps is how frequently it has something’s location completely wrong because osm addresses use the European addressing system everywhere when i don’t live in europe
OpenStreetMap contributor here. What address format isn’t supported? Maybe I can help
United States format is very different from the european format and often the apple maps algorithm makes some boneheaded assuptions to translate from a US address to something OSM understands. i contribute, too, but the next time i have an example of apple maps fucking up… i’ll have already forgot this convo happened, but i’ll try
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).
DDG is just Bing
Sorta not really.
I love DDG AI
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
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
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.
It still kinda does, since it’s Bing under the hood.
DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won’t have to switch engines soon.
Wait 'til you learn that DDG’s engine is Bing
“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?
isn’t is 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.
Last time I checked, it matched Bing results exactly.
Yahoo is Bing too
Yup.
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
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
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. Mullvad’s ui sucks.
100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010
For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.
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 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
Private browsing We protect your data and privacy so you can surf safely
This true?
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
+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.
