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
i switched from DDG to ecosia because of Lemmy and i gotta say it’s even better
DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won’t have to switch engines soon.
I love DDG AI
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
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).
“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
100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010
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.
I’ve had to use !g way too much lately, so no.
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.
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.
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.
Google is mostly adverts. Wouldn’t take much to be better than that.
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.
So far its still less bloated
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
…Oh, sorry.
Hell no. If anything, it’s gotten worse.
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.
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
That’s a bit surprising, given DDG uses Bing, Bing is Microsoft and Microsoft owns Github.
Did you try the same search with Bing, or have an example to share?
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.
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).
