• 0110010001100010@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
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      9 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
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        9 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 !g out 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:

        • LWD@lemm.ee
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          9 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*

          • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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            9 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.

    • tyler@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      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 🤷‍♀️

    • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      just use a !g if you don’t get what you want the first time on ddg and you’ll still get a proxied google search result.