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
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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So far its still less bloated
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.
I just realized the other day that I haven't typed !g in months.
Google is mostly adverts. Wouldnβt take much to be better than that.
Iβve 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 donβt understand the reluctance of people to switch to it. To me, Google has been borderline unusable garbage for a long time.
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.
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
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, itβs hot garbage and I donβt know why anyone would use it. Youβre better off trying to randomly guess the URL of the content your looking for because thatβs probably more likely to find 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
Agreed. Even if it were identical to Google maps in terms of content, it runs slower on all platforms Iβve so far tried (windows, iOS, OSX).
DDG is just Bing
Sorta not really.
I got identical results with a side-by-side comparison.
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. Thatβs 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"
Wow this is way cleaner than google. Just straight text search results for the most part.
Mullvad has recently made their google search proxy free for everyone. Itβs a good alternative to startpage: https://leta.mullvad.net/
I like startpage more still. Mullvadβs ui sucks.
"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?
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100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010
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 Iβve used DDG.
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.
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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.
DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won't have to switch engines soon.
Wait 'til you learn that DDG's engine is Bing
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
For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.
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
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.
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