4 ms·
Long ago, when I still thought of Google as a good company that made good decisions for its users, I never had the impression that I'd done an exhaustive web se
by psyc 9y ago
Long ago, when I still thought of Google as a good company that made good decisions for its users, I never had the impression that I'd done an exhaustive web search until I searched on Google. Now, searching Google always gives me the impression that I'm searching a heavily filtered, AI-curated subset of the web. I switched to DDG recently, and so far the results give me that impression that I'm searching 'the whole web' or something like it. I suppose it's inevitable that Google was ruined by becoming so enormous, having to be all things to everybody, especially its shareholders.
- nicolas_t 9y agoI love DDG but the problem is that google is still the best whenever I want to search something that's not in English or that's localized. So I still use google for that.
- lostmsu 9y agoTry Yandex if it is available in your language.
- OldArrow 9y agoHow is Yandex any better then Google?
- snag 9y agoalso recent news. google still way above ddg on minutes old news.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoHmm, I get pretty good DDG search results in Japanese. I assume you're searching in your target language, rather than search terms in English with the name of your desired language tacked on?
- nicolas_t 9y agoTo be fair, DDG is actually quite decent in Japanese but when searching in French I find that it's often lacking. I think it's mostly that French is not dissimilar enough from English for the search engine to pick up on it sometimes.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoIt might also have something to do with more French speakers knowing English than Japanese speakers knowing English.
- Kagerjay 9y agoI use DDG when I want nonlocalized results that aren't as biased But most times I want information tailored specific to my issues so google is better for me 90% of the time.
- bamboozled 9y agoDDG is mostly just Bing results in case you're unaware.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 9y agoThey use "over 400 sources" for results. Most of their links come from their own webcrawler, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
- johnward 9y agoTIL webcrawler still exists.
- staplers 9y agoThe easiest way to view how wrongly Google has strayed is to search for something like "First Singer Songwriter". Google automates a rich card to say "Charles Trenet 1938" while showing an image of Woody Guthrie.. It's generating its own fake news at this point.
- walshemj 9y agoAnd its ignoring the long history of folk protest song eg "the world turnd upside down" which is a ECW protest song. Oh and I forgot the medieval Chanson which is ever earlier.
- decasteve 9y agoLong long ago, I used to use Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, etc., and then I discovered AltaVista and I felt the similarly. The algorithms and relevance wasn't as good as what Google eventually came up with, but it felt like AltaVista had results that its contemporaries weren't getting. DDG is starting to feel a bit like AltaVista in that regard.