Yeah, DDG skips all the sponsored links but I generally find what I’m looking for faster on Google if I just skip half the page rather than trying to find the right incantation to bring up what I’m looking for on DDG.
I’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.
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.
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*
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 🤷♀️
Would you be able to give an example of what you couldn’t find with DDG that was simpler to find with the help of Google? Sounds interesting to me, as I use DDG pretty much exclusively.
I don’t remember the specific case, most of the things I Google are local businesses. I find for local businesses Google is a top tier resource. Google can tell me how busy a business is right now, or if they’re closed because of the weather. I often have to do some digging to find the business’ page on DDG, if they have one. If I’m looking for a local contractor, like a water heater or drywall repair guy, the ads aren’t even that intrusive, they’re literally what I’m looking for. On DDG, I’ve got to do some clicking to find a contractor and then all the reviews are on Yelp. General contractors will have a list sometimes on DDG, but it’s not all that helpful, I’ve never seen a phone number without clicking once or twice.
Makes sense. After all, Google has Maps to request specific data from people, and it stalks your location at all times to help figure out when places are busy.
But on the flipside, if that data were publically owned and anonymized I’d genuinely want that kept. Since the feature is super useful. Same with busses and so on.
That’s an interesting flipside. Considering we’re basically facing the same dilemma with OpenAI scraping the entire Internet now, except this time around they didn’t even do it with our presumed consent.
Yeah, DDG skips all the sponsored links but I generally find what I’m looking for faster on Google if I just skip half the page rather than trying to find the right incantation to bring up what I’m looking for on DDG.
I’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.
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.
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:
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*
You know DDG is just a wrapper around Bing right? No point comparing the two.
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.
Works on SearX
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 🤷♀️
!sp is something like ddg for bing, but it is based on google
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.AFAIK !g on DDG doesn’t proxy anything.
It does on SearXNG
nothing gets proxied, it’s just like searching directly on Google.
Would you be able to give an example of what you couldn’t find with DDG that was simpler to find with the help of Google? Sounds interesting to me, as I use DDG pretty much exclusively.
I don’t remember the specific case, most of the things I Google are local businesses. I find for local businesses Google is a top tier resource. Google can tell me how busy a business is right now, or if they’re closed because of the weather. I often have to do some digging to find the business’ page on DDG, if they have one. If I’m looking for a local contractor, like a water heater or drywall repair guy, the ads aren’t even that intrusive, they’re literally what I’m looking for. On DDG, I’ve got to do some clicking to find a contractor and then all the reviews are on Yelp. General contractors will have a list sometimes on DDG, but it’s not all that helpful, I’ve never seen a phone number without clicking once or twice.
Makes sense. After all, Google has Maps to request specific data from people, and it stalks your location at all times to help figure out when places are busy.
But on the flipside, if that data were publically owned and anonymized I’d genuinely want that kept. Since the feature is super useful. Same with busses and so on.
That’s an interesting flipside. Considering we’re basically facing the same dilemma with OpenAI scraping the entire Internet now, except this time around they didn’t even do it with our presumed consent.