I just had it happen again. That is to say I did a basic search and not a single returned item was what I was looking for. I tried again on DuckDuckGo and got the same useless results.
Search is fucking doooooooooomed and these workarounds aren’t helping all that much.
All I wanted to know was the pre-cooked weight of fast food company X’s basic patty. What I got was 20+ articles with press release, media hype, and stealth ads disguised as articles. Just tell me how many g of beef it is, k.
For some reason google won’t implement user-defined site blocklist, even though some other search engines have that feature. You’ll have to add -site:website_name manually every time you search.
Google outright ignores their operators now. There are a bajillion examples of them doing so on Reddit if you doubt that. You can search the subject and see for yourself. They’ll occasionally honor them if there’s no money to be lost, but they’ll blatantly ignore them to show you sponsored content and sites with AdSense on them.
To everyone complaining about DDG, what are you using? I’ve been using DDG for years now and it’s been fine for me. I have also been testing out StartPage.
I often just get 0 results on ddg, or I know that I should get a specific one and don’t (e.g. recently I tried to find the painting “in a Roman trattoria” by describing it).
Are you a native English speaker in an English speaking country looking for English pages?
Because as a French speaker, when I tried DDG a few years ago, it was pretty hard to have some useful results. Like, I was looking for some local results and they were nowhere to be found.
I know it got better, that it’s possible to tweak this, and that I should try it again. But because the first impression wasn’t good for me, it made me dubious about giving it another try.
Are you a native English speaker in an English speaking country looking for English pages?
That is correct. I’ve not experienced the issue you’re facing since I don’t often search DDG in my second language but I’ve heard of people having the issue you mentioned.
This isn’t gonna help me at all… Most of the time, my problem is that I am looking for something hella recent and only getting results from 5 years ago or more. Used to be able to add a month and year but lately it straight up just ignores it (“showing results for [query without the 2024 I added]” bullshit). Forcing it to search a string with quotes doesn’t help either.
Do you use it? How good are the results on rare topics?
I’d be willing to pay for an actually good search engine, but most engines I check give subpar results to google. It’s fine to use a privacy focused search engine for easy searches, but I don’t want to pay for one that will still require me to use google for anything complicated or super specific.
I use Kagi for everything, and use DDG and Google as backup searches. Usually, if Kagi didn’t get me what I want, others won’t either. I still prefer using multiple engines when looking into certain things, and that’s no fault of Kagi.
Best feature IMO is personal ranking and DenyListing. For example, I can downrank Microsoft.com from my results, uprank StackOverFlow, and block CNet from my results. I can also downrank or block SEO nonsense sites from my results. I use this feature carefully, because I don’t want to create my own bubble, but some sites are empirically terrible quality
I guess that’s not really possible at the moment because kagi sources their data from other providers where each one of them charges by usage. They’re banking on their users to not search as much so they can be profitable, which means they’re incentivized to make their search result good so their users won’t repeatedly search same topics over and over.
Honestly, I thought the same! I primarily use DDG, but when that doesn’t cut it, I go use my Kagi free trial of 100 searches. It’s lasted me months at this point, which is a testament to DDG and Kagi tbh. DDG for getting me there 99% of the time, and Kagi for delivering on the rest, with the bonus of being customizable and privacy focused. When the trial runs out, I will likely purchase the lowest tier so I can mix it in more bc the result quality is truly higher and it actually LISTENS to my quotes and + & - terms. You may not do as many searches as you think, and for throwaway searches, DDG is probs good enough.
Im a dev & my entire job is googling shit basically, so it’s worth it for me to get quality results without dealing with the bullshit AI SEO wasteland
I wish it was $5 for 300 searches, or even 150 searches. I really don’t like that it’s a subscription for limited searches, why can’t I pay per search?
I really wanted to like DDG, but its results returned are so horribly unusable, I had to give up.
I’m usually searching for something obscure, but add in general terms for general refinement. DDG will ignore my obscure term (the thing I’m actually looking for) and give me pages of results of the general terms. Using special operators doesn’t help. Whereas Google will give me at least a few relevant results using the same search terms.
I get the same pattern of ignoring obscure terms in both Bing and Google. Bings results include some that seem to assume I made a typo and Google includes a some sites that are just alternates that are the equivalent of ads.
I remember five or so years ago when both could at least return some relevant results anytime I used more than a few words.
Yeah I gave duck duck go another shot the other day and it was FAR and away worse than google. Considering how bad Google has been lately I was impressed (and disappointed) by how much worse DDG was.
I’ve been digging Kagi. It does cost money, but it’s a small price to pay for the return of my sanity. I was constantly frustrated by Google results a hundred times per day before I switched to Kagi.
Yeah I don’t know why DuckDuckGo keeps getting recommended as much as it does.
I couldn’t find on Google, the answer to a simple question the other day. All I wanted to know was the precooked weight of a particular fast food restaurant’s patty.
I made it to page 3 of the Google results, wading through page after page of promotional content, news releases, and sponsored “news-style” articles that were thinly veiled ads.
Decided to visit duck duck go, and was greeted with search results that were even worse than Google.
I realize it’s only one example, but to me it was an example of a search so specific, its egregious that the search engines simply refuse to return a page with the answer.
DDG for me was always a matter of exchanging a bit of convenience for a bit of freedom. The results are usually a bit poorer (or extremely poorer if websearching in Italian or Portuguese), but at least it isn’t vulturing my data.
I just tested it out by typing in “Sonic the hedgehog fanart”. For once, I was able to get some decent images without being bombarded by uncanny valley ai-generated images of Sonic wearing Rouge’s outfit or poorly-drawn inflation art. So it seems to be off to a good start.