I mean, kagi is great. I too got frustrated with the shittiness of DDG and others like ecosia. Paying for a search engine sounds crazy but I’m not going back. Google’s results are absolutely terrible compared to kagi so 🤷♀️
Comment on Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
0110010001100010@lemmy.world 8 months agoI’ve tried, many times over the years, to use DDG and you are 100% spot-on. I find it damn-near impossible to find what I need without some deep voodoo magic to somehow craft the perfect query. It’s been a decade+ since I’ve gone to page 2 of a Google search. Using DDG I can be 3 or 4 pages deep before maybe finding the answer. There is SOOO much irrelevant stuff to filter through.
It sucks, I don’t want to use Google, but there doesn’t seem to be a great alternative.
tyler@programming.dev 8 months ago
aniki@lemm.ee 8 months ago
just use a
!gif you don’t get what you want the first time on ddg and you’ll still get a proxied google search result.Engywuck@lemm.ee 8 months ago
AFAIK !g on DDG doesn’t proxy anything.
ratcliff@lemmy.wtf 8 months ago
It does on SearXNG
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 8 months ago
nothing gets proxied, it’s just like searching directly on Google.
Aopen@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
!sp is something like ddg for bing, but it is based on google
LWD@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Care to share what kind of stuff you look for? Usually, when I look for niche media or code stuff, either I find it effectively enough on DuckDuckGo, or it’s not on Google at all, full stop.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I swear I’m going to capture screenshots of 2-3 dozen searches across DDG & Google, as well as hopefully Bing, Startpage… SearXNG…
b/c DDG is doodoo while corporate overlord Google is great with Ublock Origin.
Faithfully perform every search on DDG first in the hopes I can keep the data out of Google’s hands! But
!gout half the time.—
Anybody know of a site, app, or TamperMonkey script that’ll search multiple search engines side-by-side?
In the meantime, one example w/a direct quote from deep inside a Harry Potter book:
Image
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You know DDG is just a wrapper around Bing right? No point comparing the two.
Carighan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not entirely true, they have their own index they use to augment/modify the results with. Like the paper linked in this very post shows, actually.
LWD@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Genuinely, thank you for going through the trouble. I know it’s a huge ask, especially because it’s not easy to retroactively remember a specific type of search you were struggling with on one engine versus the other.
*Insert joke about how Google is the woke search engine here*
ratcliff@lemmy.wtf 8 months ago
Works on SearX
0110010001100010@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Honestly it’s been a yearish since I’ve tried and my memory is shit so I don’t have any specific examples I can give now. In general though the bulk of my searches involve:
I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Tbh using DDG is more like using old (and I mean old) Google. Googling things used to be a skill people had. You googled things for other people because they had no idea how to get good results. That’s exactly how DDG is. It takes rewiring your brain to use it, and I’ve been using it for a year now.
I do go to Google sometimes. Specifically for opening hours in stores, and when I’m trying to look for products from smaller online stores I do not yet know of, which takes me to page 3-4 of Google but would’ve taken me far longer on DDG.
The country switch on DDG is a godsend because you can manipulate searches with it and get some really specific results if you know what you’re doing. It’s the learning curve that makes DDG worse if you just want to find something without having to teach yourself to search. Which is definitely a point to Google, but if you want a very specific result it’s better to battle that learning curve.
RememberTheApollo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
All true. DDG is my default search engine now. Yeah. I use others often enough, Google, Bing, searXNG…but I find that if I can’t find it relatively easily on DDG it means I’m going to have to sift through a bunch of SEO sites and sponsored links on Google to find it. It won’t be much easier. One of the most frustrating thing about Google is the “fuck you” they’ve given to search modifiers. The “-“ and quotes are pretty much meaningless. For instance one can enter an error code from a program, perfectly quoted, and Google will tell you there aren’t any good search results. BS. They just can’t figure out how to jam ads into what you’re looking for or something. Bing or DDG will return what you need, it might just be on page 2.
Google really has failed as a search engine.
DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I find that DDG is terrible at finding anything regionally specific, probably because I’m not in the US. I always get a shitload of US hits and usually some German hits if I trybto specify location…neither are useful to me.
LWD@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Interesting, I have the exact opposite problem: after telling the search engine not to serve up local results, it serves me local results anyway. I’ve even identified this behavior when switching to different countries via a VPN.