Comment on You're Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds
OpenStars@startrek.website 9 months agoDuckDuckGo finds some things. I’m no expert.
I would NOT use it for shopping, I tried that recently and got a ton of really sketchy looking sites with way too cheap products that had no internet presence before this month. This might be more pronounced if you search specific product model numbers like I was rather than general terms.
I’ve had it be mostly okay on other stuff. I use it over Google but mostly because I don’t want to pay for a search engine.
Tbf, do those sketchy sites also show up with Google?
I’d have to repeat the search to check again, but I don’t remember seeing the same sites when I repeated the search on Google, at least not on the first page in the top few spots the way it was on DDG.
So maybe that’s the genius of DDG - you skip right past the predatory SEO-optimized sites straight away to the predatory sketchy ones:-D.
sturlabragason@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah but those are just privacy protective Bing results, right?
duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/…/sources/
OpenStars@startrek.website 9 months ago
I’ve heard people say that the answer is no, but in looking into it just now myself it looks like rather it is sometimes yes as well.
Basically the best way to describe it seems to be that it is “NOT Google, and MOSTLY does not want to be FULLY Bing (but still is somewhat, they’re wanting to work on it, but to be clear they do have embedded Microsoft trackers that they are forced to leave in due to their licensing agreement)”.