I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.
DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.
Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything?
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 11 months ago
I’ve finally switched to DuckDuckGo because of this. Even though only about two months ago I said here somewhere that it’s garbage. Google just managed to convince me that they’re more garbage.
I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.
DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.
The only downside of DDG is that it doesn’t have a decade or two of algorithm data to personalise your searches and sort of “learn” what you mean with certain terms.
Not like I miss it too much. It’s just a mild culture shock to suddenly having to be more clear with my searches
That’s a good thing, in my opinion. I miss when Google results were the same for everyone.
It just occurred to me that this ability to communicate with a search engine, that everyone used to call Google-fu, was exactly this! It didn’t already know (or think it knew) what you were getting at, and it’s took some practice to figure out how to finesse the results.
You mean the upside is it doesn’t track every behavioral trait? I can live with that
I’ve been using Bing and choosing Google only as a second resort or for any shopping I do. If Google wants to be an ad filled shopping mall, I’ll treat it as an ad-blocked shopping mall.
In that case you should be using DuckDuckGo; it uses the same database as Bing, without the tracking of Bing, and with the ability to use ! commands to pull in results from other places (!g=Google, !w=Wikipedia, etc.).
When I’m specifically shopping for things I expect to be tracked and advertised to. I’m just selectively deciding who gets to advertise to me.
Over the last year of me using DDG as my primary search engine it has noticeably improved, give it another and we might see a trace of that spark Google had
I find my DDG results are only getting worse with time.
Same problem as with Google, and then some.
Carefully craft search string and submit.
Click through to a result, scroll and try to find the part that addresses my question.
Get frustrated and Ctrl+F for the active part of my search string.
Don’t find it.
Hit back to search results to repeat (but now the results are shuffled for some reason?)
Eventually give up and put the active parts into quotes to force their inclusion.
Same results.
Why am I getting these results if they don’t even match my search string?
So you’re using Bing.
It may be bing under the hood, but it gives simple results without having ads and giant boxes everywhere.
Ddg is my default, but I still find myself having to resort to Google when the query is not dead simple. The engine is good enough for most cases, but overall Google is just better imo.
been using duckduckgo for a while now. it definetely could be better, but google is just hot garbage.
DDG is way worse than google. I am baffled by this comment.
coffee_poops@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
That’s because DDG gets its results from Bing.
radix@lemmy.world 11 months ago
But without the chatgpt spam that has overtaken bing the last few months.