Google is mostly adverts. Wouldnβt take much to be better than that.
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Asklemmy
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I just realized the other day that I haven't typed !g in months.
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.
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.
i switched from DDG to ecosia because of Lemmy and i gotta say it's even better
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.
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.
100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010
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.
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.
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.
"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 still haven't found Google to be worse than Bing yet.
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.
Last time I checked, it matched Bing results exactly.
Yup.
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.
It still kinda does, since it's Bing under the hood.
:(
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
Yeah, I trust DuckDuckGo. And I like they anonymize my AI queries. I feel like itβs the next best thing to running it locally.
Does their 'anonymizing queries' feat mean anything if they don't disclose how it works or what that even means literally?
At least with the open source models the data is not sent to the big bad tech cooperations afaik
"Trust me bro"