DuckDuckGo Just Finished a Banner Year

DuckDuckGo Just Finished a Banner Year

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• by Echoez ( 562950 ) * on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @12:04PM (#62142113)

  Same here. Is DDG better? I'm not sure, but it's certainly "good enough" that the slightly worse results are a welcome trade-off to being followed everywhere across the internet. Combined with Brave browser, it's amazing at how less spied-upon you feel. I remember buying a shirt from Banana Republic, and for MONTHS afterwards, I'd see BR ads on every site (for shirts! I just bought a shirt! I don't need another one).

  I even have a DDG widget on my Android home screen, and it also works just as well. DDG also has a good image search, it handles movie showtimes, etc. I just don't see a need to go back to Google.

  • 1 hidden comment

  • • Re:

      Youre just flat out lying, I just tried a google search for funny biden memes and there was zero mentions of Trump.

      • Yes the AC is lying.

        Now it is true that Google is getting crappier and crappier, but not because it is pushing a political agenda - it is because it is pushing monetization for its bottom line (which can never be fat enough), and a push to lowest common denominator search and an associated notion that it is better to return lots of irrelevant results, than show the user there are only limited matches.

        Search result diluting practices include boosting links with commercial value for Google, sure, but to me even more annoying is returning links that do not contain the terms I entered, even quoting every term to tell Google "yes I really want to search on this" is not completely effective. It returns irrelevant links in two ways that I have observed - deleting terms from your search (though often, but not always they tell you in tiny little letters that this link was for a different search with a term or two deleted); and stuffing terms they think are similar into you search instead of what you actually searched on. On some searches this last effect can be really bad.

        • 2 hidden comments

• I was just reading a comment thread on Hacker News [ycombinator.com] last night about people complaining about Google search results returning nothing but SEO spam sites these days.

  I switched to DDG a while ago too but mostly because I started to find that it actually gives me better search results these days.

  The only exception is if I want local results for, like, restaurants or something. Then I'll open Google in a private window and deal with the fact that they'll use GeoIP to know my location (I hardly ever use a cell phone for anything - not only because of privacy but because I'm old and never jumped on the bandwagon, now get off my lawn).

  DDG gives me the sense that it's doing keyword matching rather than trying to guess what I meant to search for based on current trends and my past search history etc. I think Google took personalization and ML way too far and started to become useless, at least for tech-savvy people.

  What was discussed in the Hacker News thread yesterday was exploring how Google's usefulness originally came from using hyperlinks as a form "vote." But this meant that votes became a sort of currency and so websites started linking to each other less, especially as content began to move off of the open web and into walled gardens. All that's left is SEO spam sites that give you useless nonsense like "The Best Grills in 2022!" which is just a bunch of fake content wrapping affiliate links.

  DDG does return those spam sites but I seem to get a lot more actual content in the results... in addition to better privacy and a search term parser that doesn't try to guess what I meant to search for.

  • Re:

    I switched to DDG a while ago too but mostly because I started to find that it actually gives me better search results these days.

    I switched TO DDG a while ago as well but lately I've had to fall back to Google far more often because the results on DDG are sometimes just terrible. Don't get me wrong, Google has gotten a lot worse as well over the past several years, but at least I can eventually find what I want with Google while that seems to be getting a lot harder to do with DDG.

    • Re:

      I suggest using startpage or one of the googlified searx proxies.

      • Re:

        Yeah I've been using DDG for a year our two now exclusively, with Startpage my fallback when I need Google results. It's worked out well.

      • Re: Switched over

        Startpage has been giving me garbage results lately. Type the same search into Google and the first page is full of valid results.

        It's almost like Google are deliberately thwarting them to drive the search directly to Google.

    • Re:

      I'll second this: DDG is generally good enough and i use it as my primary, but I find several times a month I need to run the same search on google to get what I'm after.

      Generally, I think I've noticed it improving over the course of the year 2021, and and if you are trying to move away from the big tech companies that are blatant about viewing you as their product, I'd say it's a fine solution.

  • I'll add some more complaints. The youtube results that keep showing up in google searches. If I wanted youtube I would go there and search. The local retailer links are worthless too. They don't even respect wrapping terms in quotes. I can come up with two word searches where the second word is completely ignored even with quotes.

  • Re:

    Google does give better results than DDG (via way of startpage.com) sometimes tho. DDG is my go to, and then I'll try startpage (proxied google) if I'm not happy with results

  • Re:

    Got a link to that thread?

• Re:

  Switched over about a year ago because Google was really getting on my nerves. Now I use Google maybe 2-3 times a month and often find that no, it does not find anything relevant either.

  • Re:

    We all know the real reason you still go back to google, porn.

    DDG doesn't do porn or math equations.

    • Re:

      You seems to be mentally defective, because you state things that you obviously know absolutely nothing about and have not tried to find out. Pathetic.

• Re:

  My favourite aspect of DDG is that it doesn't profile users. You just get the results to your queries, no matter what your search history might be. That way, you can learn how to write better search queries without some profiling algorithm complicating things for you.