You can improve your google search results by using DuckDuckGo instead.
To be honest it’s still a crapshoot of SEO bs.
I really wanted to like DDG, but its results returned are so horribly unusable, I had to give up.
I’m usually searching for something obscure, but add in general terms for general refinement. DDG will ignore my obscure term (the thing I’m actually looking for) and give me pages of results of the general terms. Using special operators doesn’t help. Whereas Google will give me at least a few relevant results using the same search terms.
Yeah I gave duck duck go another shot the other day and it was FAR and away worse than google. Considering how bad Google has been lately I was impressed (and disappointed) by how much worse DDG was.
I get the same pattern of ignoring obscure terms in both Bing and Google. Bings results include some that seem to assume I made a typo and Google includes a some sites that are just alternates that are the equivalent of ads.
I remember five or so years ago when both could at least return some relevant results anytime I used more than a few words.
I’ve been digging Kagi. It does cost money, but it’s a small price to pay for the return of my sanity. I was constantly frustrated by Google results a hundred times per day before I switched to Kagi.
Yeah I don’t know why DuckDuckGo keeps getting recommended as much as it does.
I couldn’t find on Google, the answer to a simple question the other day. All I wanted to know was the precooked weight of a particular fast food restaurant’s patty.
I made it to page 3 of the Google results, wading through page after page of promotional content, news releases, and sponsored “news-style” articles that were thinly veiled ads.
Decided to visit duck duck go, and was greeted with search results that were even worse than Google.
I realize it’s only one example, but to me it was an example of a search so specific, its egregious that the search engines simply refuse to return a page with the answer.
It go so much worse lately it’s on par with Google. I’m out of search engines tbf
[deleted]
Same
I just tested it out by typing in “Sonic the hedgehog fanart”. For once, I was able to get some decent images without being bombarded by uncanny valley ai-generated images of Sonic wearing Rouge’s outfit or poorly-drawn inflation art. So it seems to be off to a good start.
Trying Searx currently.
Didn’t Searx lose support and maintenance?
Do tell.
I am currently testing the fork SearxNG, which still has development this week.
Let me know any concerns about SearxNG. Seems to be solid so far.
Here is the about page.
OK wasn’t my imagination then.
Nah, DDG is arguably worse than Google now with their search results - I just ended up going back to Google after a couple of years of using DDG.
Didnt go to google but I hate ddg now
[deleted]
Bing it is then
I thought ddg used bing.
Gopher it is then!
It isnt the bing part of ddg it is themselves.
They have started tailoring results locally no matter your settings.
DDG for me was always a matter of exchanging a bit of convenience for a bit of freedom. The results are usually a bit poorer (or extremely poorer if websearching in Italian or Portuguese), but at least it isn’t vulturing my data.
Its really not much better
Which is basically Bing.
Fuck ddg, turning into wht they sought to destroy
No. DDG sux.
Tried, kept returning to Google for “real” searches
s/DuckDuckGo/Kagi/
No.
Especially with non-English stuff. Let’s be realistic here
Oscar winners 2024 before:2023
(It actually ends up being useful because many of the results seem to come from pages created earlier but updated now)
You used to be able to improve them by adding quotes too but for some reason that just pushes all the sponsored results to the top these days
Sponsored results make me irrationally angry and push me to Kagi every time I see them.
Google outright ignores their operators now. There are a bajillion examples of them doing so on Reddit if you doubt that. You can search the subject and see for yourself. They’ll occasionally honor them if there’s no money to be lost, but they’ll blatantly ignore them to show you sponsored content and sites with AdSense on them.
You have to change the search parameters to ‘verbatim’ now. It’s a pain in the ass
To everyone complaining about DDG, what are you using? I’ve been using DDG for years now and it’s been fine for me. I have also been testing out StartPage.
SearXNG - the fediverse of searches
Doesn’t it just use Google / Bing under the hood? If those both suck then it wouldn’t improve much, right? Isn’t SearXNG more about privacy?
Its more about the customizability. One searxng search can search through 100 search engines if you really wanted it to
Almost all other search engines (ddg, kagi, etc) also use google / bing dataset to augment their search data.
Kagi
Every time I switch to DDG I’m constantly discovering things that I can’t find because they just don’t pop up in the results
…constantly discovering things that I can’t find…
Maybe I’m having a stroke…but…
Wat
I assume they mean something like:
Every time I switch to DDG, I tend to discover things that I can’t find on google because they just don’t pop up in googlee results
I pronounced googlee as “goo glee” and it was fun
I often just get 0 results on ddg, or I know that I should get a specific one and don’t (e.g. recently I tried to find the painting “in a Roman trattoria” by describing it).
Google always had to come to the rescue
Ddg, what is the definition of insanity?
They may mean unable to find again?
perplexity
Searx
Are you a native English speaker in an English speaking country looking for English pages?
Because as a French speaker, when I tried DDG a few years ago, it was pretty hard to have some useful results. Like, I was looking for some local results and they were nowhere to be found.
I know it got better, that it’s possible to tweak this, and that I should try it again. But because the first impression wasn’t good for me, it made me dubious about giving it another try.
Are you a native English speaker in an English speaking country looking for English pages?
That is correct. I’ve not experienced the issue you’re facing since I don’t often search DDG in my second language but I’ve heard of people having the issue you mentioned.
Ddg.
I don’t complain about DDG (it’s been years since the last time I used it) but I’m using Qwant.
I haven’t seen anyone complain about duck duck go for several years.
This thread has some people discussing how they feel it isn’t great compared to others.
What about the past participle though? With Google it’s easy - I Googled it. But DuckDuckGoed? That doesn’t sound right. DuckDuckWent?
Searched?
This man ducks
If you really want good search results, check out Kagi.
5 euros for only 300 searches a month. That’s ridiculous
Yeah kagi looks quite good to me but I just can’t justify their asking price.
3€ / month for unlimited searches is probably as far as Id go. Hopefully they find a way to lower prices in the future and capture a wider audience.
You’re apparently worth something like $40/month to Google.
So they’re already at a competitive disadvantage to services where you are the product and not the customer.
Stuff’s not free.
I guess that’s not really possible at the moment because kagi sources their data from other providers where each one of them charges by usage. They’re banking on their users to not search as much so they can be profitable, which means they’re incentivized to make their search result good so their users won’t repeatedly search same topics over and over.
I switched to yearly billing recently and it’s a bit cheaper that way.
Honestly, I thought the same! I primarily use DDG, but when that doesn’t cut it, I go use my Kagi free trial of 100 searches. It’s lasted me months at this point, which is a testament to DDG and Kagi tbh. DDG for getting me there 99% of the time, and Kagi for delivering on the rest, with the bonus of being customizable and privacy focused. When the trial runs out, I will likely purchase the lowest tier so I can mix it in more bc the result quality is truly higher and it actually LISTENS to my quotes and + & - terms. You may not do as many searches as you think, and for throwaway searches, DDG is probs good enough.
Im a dev & my entire job is googling shit basically, so it’s worth it for me to get quality results without dealing with the bullshit AI SEO wasteland
I’ve been pretty happy with the $10/mo plan. And I really wasn’t planning on using past the first month originally.
I wish it was $5 for 300 searches, or even 150 searches. I really don’t like that it’s a subscription for limited searches, why can’t I pay per search?
What’s wrong with this price for a tool you use multiple times every day?
The reincarnation of Marie Antoinette over here
Do you use it? How good are the results on rare topics?
I’d be willing to pay for an actually good search engine, but most engines I check give subpar results to google. It’s fine to use a privacy focused search engine for easy searches, but I don’t want to pay for one that will still require me to use google for anything complicated or super specific.
I use Kagi for everything, and use DDG and Google as backup searches. Usually, if Kagi didn’t get me what I want, others won’t either. I still prefer using multiple engines when looking into certain things, and that’s no fault of Kagi.
Best feature IMO is personal ranking and DenyListing. For example, I can downrank Microsoft.com from my results, uprank StackOverFlow, and block CNet from my results. I can also downrank or block SEO nonsense sites from my results. I use this feature carefully, because I don’t want to create my own bubble, but some sites are empirically terrible quality
There is a 100 searches trial which oddly enough is actually plenty. It was a very good experience but I wish there was a cheaper plan to be fair
Kagi is good, but for rare topics try search.marginalia.nu
We should have a search engine blocklists, like for adblocks, with common sites known for bullshit (AI) generated content.
For some reason google won’t implement user-defined site blocklist, even though some other search engines have that feature. You’ll have to add
-site:website_namemanually every time you search.i’ll just drop this here: uBlacklist, a Google Search filter which implements exactly this feature for Firefox/Chrome/Safari
Or use an extension
A pain to use cross platform. And the results are being processed and send anyway, just hidden.
Blocklist would allow engine to know to not even look at it.
Cross platform? It’s a browser extension.
Kagi does that.
But tbh, I couldn’t justify paying for a search engine. But maybe that’s not fair for how often I use it.
Is there something similar for duckduckgo?
This isn’t gonna help me at all… Most of the time, my problem is that I am looking for something hella recent and only getting results from 5 years ago or more. Used to be able to add a month and year but lately it straight up just ignores it (“showing results for [query without the 2024 I added]” bullshit). Forcing it to search a string with quotes doesn’t help either.
I usually do the quotes thing but the same phrase in quotes 3 or 4 times. You have to tell it you *really" mean it
You can just search using more options to only have results from today, last week, last year Etc. On Google?
Are people not aware of that? Then you only get something recent. Works pretty well.
Does it help if you use verbatim mode?
This might sound stupid, but have you tried using after:2024-01-01? That works as well.
I need a more specific one, before:ai
I just had it happen again. That is to say I did a basic search and not a single returned item was what I was looking for. I tried again on DuckDuckGo and got the same useless results.
Search is fucking doooooooooomed and these workarounds aren’t helping all that much.
All I wanted to know was the pre-cooked weight of fast food company X’s basic patty. What I got was 20+ articles with press release, media hype, and stealth ads disguised as articles. Just tell me how many g of beef it is, k.
You can also improve your search if you use www.duckduckgo.com
Is there a browser extension for this yet?
Qwant seems to be doing pretty good with search results
Qwant is bing minus ads. No seriously it’s just licensed bing results.
Hmmm I never thought I’d say Bing was doing an ok job then. I was using ddg, then searxg but qwant seems to be best right now
There was already a lot of trash before. Affiliate websites for example
I really like using this on YT.
