6 ms·
a bit tangential but has anyone noticed a serious degredation in quality with duckduckgo? its become completely unusable and ive had to switch to Bing :( My gu
by geokon 11mo ago
a bit tangential but has anyone noticed a serious degredation in quality with duckduckgo? its become completely unusable and ive had to switch to Bing :(
My guess is search's days are numbered and companies are "pivoting" away to other projects
a shutdown is preferable to silent bitrot
- eviks 11mo agoBut ddg is just Bing? How is it worse?
- geokon 11mo agoi dont know their internals but its very clearly not. You can try side by side. Extremely basic searches fail. It seems intermittent and inconsisent. Maybe their backend to Bing fails and the fallback is terrible. Just guessing Right this moment it seems to work. 2 Days ago Id search for something basic like "CSS colors" and not get back a single usable result
- lossyalgo 11mo agoAre you perhaps getting AI-generated trash that is just SEO optimized? I've noticed a TON more of these results in DDG and Google lately. You can now block those websites completely from DDG as of very recently (or at least I only noticed it very recently, and it's a true godsend to filter out all this AI-generated trash).
- geokon 11mo agohow do you block them? but yeah its a combination of SEO trash but it also seemingly not having stuff indexed I'd search "Ask Clojure" or "Clojure Agents" and nothing from Clojure.org would show up or like "MDN SVG circle" and the MDN would just not show up. of course today im trying it and its all working haha
- lossyalgo 11mo agoWeird, DDG supposedly uses Bing which should be indexing everything. Then again this is Microsoft, who can't even get local search working - Win11 lately can't even find Add/Remove Programs on my PC, I have to go through Settings and click 18 times before I find it. re blocking: after every search in the upper-right corner of each link I see 3 dots which opens a menu and offers "block this site from all results".
- AnonC 11mo agoDuckDuckGo has always been bad or just adequate for some specific purposes. Though it’s been my default search engine for a long time, I do use the “!g” bang command on the search query to switch to Google when I find that DDG’s results aren’t relevant or adequate. In the last year or so, I look for the summaries from “Search Assist” and the dive into a chat with the (limited?) LLM models that it provides. It’s my go to for LLM usage. It’s rarely and for more complex needs that I go to ChatGPT.
- duttish 11mo agoWhenever ddg returns shit results for me and I try !g I still get shit results, but with more ads. I've stopped trying !g since a couple of years now. Wonder what's different, it seems people's experience differ quite a lot.
- culi 11mo agoTruth is no one has as much data as Google and no one can build as good of a search engine as they can. Google results "suck" on purpose. They want you to google something multiple times so they can serve you more ads. But they are totally capable of building a good search engine Kagi is proof of this. Kagi results are almost all the Google search API. It shows that Google is completely capable of building a better search engine if they wanted to
- Cerium 11mo agoI switched to Kagi a few years ago and have not looked back. The quality has been great and continues to perform well.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 11mo agoIs location aware search usable now? The answer when I was using it like a year ago was... no
- aryonoco 11mo agoIn my experience, yes. I’m in Australia and when I want results from my state or even my neighbourhood, I only get the relevant results now. I think YMMV though and this is probably highly location dependant.
- Semaphor 11mo agoNo, and since they broke language searching in December 2024, it got even worse. I still use it because those are not very relevant for me, but it’s a shame.
- rectang 11mo agoI recently bought a DDG subscription because of their duck.ai service. For $10/month it’s great to have someone whose incentives are aligned with my own managing my relationships with AI companies I’d otherwise have to monitor constantly for privacy abuses. I haven’t noticed a recent degradation in DDG’s search results, but I’m also turning to duck.ai more frequently and on the whole my search/investigation experience is better. The one significant downside is that duck.ai limits the length of your chats, but considering the price that’s not surprising. The direction I’d like to see the industry go is better integration of search results into AI chat, blurring the distinction between the two. That would make both products more compelling: search results are made more friendly with AI summaries, and original sources help to counter AI hallucinations and obsequious blather.
- lossyalgo 11mo agoAI is killing websites[0]. Why visit a website if the AI summary is good? But soon, if everyone is only using AI results, then there will be no reason to create new websites, unless you don't care about anyone visiting your site except for AI crawlers. [0]: I won't bother linking any articles since there are too many articles on the subject and whatever I link is probably not the site you want (or is maybe paywalled).
- rectang 11mo agoThere are many serious ethical and practical problems posed by the rise of LLMs, and I agree that this is one. My hope is that AI helps to fine tune inquiries and helps users discover websites that would otherwise not have been uncovered by traditional index-based search. Unfortunately it’s in the interests of search and AI companies to keep you inside their portals, so they may be less than willing to link to the outside even when it would improve the experience.
- lossyalgo 11mo agoHard agree. I was recently at a talk from Jaron Lanier[0], who proposed that AI should, after every query, present on the right-side of the page a list of all clickable sources where AI gathered it's data from, so that we could verify accuracy, as well as allowing us to continue giving traffic to websites. [0] https://www.jaronlanier.com https://www.jaronlanier.com edit: grammar
- subarctic 11mo agoI switched to brave search a year or two ago and found it to be an improvement
- Aurornis 11mo agoI have DDG set as the primary in some places and Google as the primary on other devices, so I’ve used both in parallel for years. To be honest, DDG has always been far behind Google. It’s fine when I know my search result is going to be in the top 10 of any engine I use, but the moment I need to search for anything non obvious I don’t even bother with DDG any more. DDG does seem marginally worse today than it was maybe 5 years ago. It falls off rapidly past the first few results. Now it even seems like it just starts mixing generic results from some popular adjacent keyword into the results and hopes we don’t notice as users that it stopped trying to search by page 2.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo agoI've started to wonder/worry that maybe it's not the search engines (excluding Google, I won't apologize for them). What if there's just nothing to search for? If there is little on the internet besides trash and a few big portals? Much of what you might be searching for whether you know it or not will be a reddit post, or Facebook, or Stackoverflow. And some of those places don't even allow for proper indexing by crawlers. Worse than that nightmare fuel is the idea that 2025 just isn't the same internet as we grew up with, where everyone was racing to shovel as much real content onto it as they could... today it's a bunch of grifters hoping to be influencers or Youtube personalities or skeevy scammers AI-generating slop but not much else. And so, even if Google was the same thing it was back in 2010, there's no longer anything for "search" to find. And I hope you all downvote me to -50 and scream at me for being a retard with some snarky-assed abuse detailing how and why I am wrong. Because I don't want to be correct about this.
- ijk 11mo agoUnfortunately, I am also worried that is the case. There was an era where there were a lot of completely free sites, because they were mostly academic or passion projects, both of which are subsidized by other means. Then there were ads. Banner adds, Google's less obtrusive text ads, etc. There were a number of sites completely supported by ads. Including a lot of blogs. And forums. Google+ managed to kill a lot of niche communities by offering them a much easier way to create a community and then killing it off. Now forums have been replaced by Discord and Reddit. Deep project sites still exist but are rarer. Social media has consolidated. Most people don't have personal home pages. There's a bunch of stuff that's paywalled behind Patreon. And all of that has been happening before anyone threw AI into the mix.
- lossyalgo 11mo agoThat's weird to hear. I've been using DDG daily since years and it's gotten progressively better, though lately every search engine's top results are often AI generated trash. To combat this it seems that DDG recently added a feature to every link in the upper-right corner to "block this site from all results" which is something I've been waiting for since SEO optimizing trash became a thing.
- BrenBarn 11mo agoWhat I have noticed is how slow it is to load versus other search engines. It's not much in the scheme of things but it's noticeable.
- dackdel 11mo agoi use kagi and duckduckgo. between the two i get my work done
- csomar 11mo ago> My guess is search's days are numbered and companies are "pivoting" away to other projects Pretty much. Most (all?) search engines have basically stopped indexing the web. If you create content that doesn't make it through social media and has significant links, Google won't just index your website. No, it's not under-ranking your site. It's plainly not indexing it. So if you have weird, specific content out there; it simply won't show up for a particular search. Search is pretty much over and no one is interested in getting that fixed.
- ThePowerOfFuet 11mo agoKagi. Seriously.
- ajdude 11mo agoI stopped using duckduckgo and switched to kagi shortly after the tankman fiasco[1]. Never been happier- if you want to support the continued existence of search, then pay for it. [1] Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo 560 points by MaxHoppersGhost on June 4, 2021 | 126 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
- yegg 11mo agoWe never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324
- dvntsemicolon 11mo agoI just switched to Kagi. It's great
- RamRodification 11mo agoKagi uses Russian search engine Yandex (EDIT: among several other sources) to produce search results, which means they pay them, which means indirectly sponsoring Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There are more or less valid arguments for not excluding Yandex[1], but as a European, I want to avoid any of my money going to Russia if possible. And there is no setting to exclude Yandex from your Kagi search results. If you stopped using duckduckgo because of the tankman fiasco, maybe you should reconsider if Kagi is right for you. [1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19 https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
- rvnx 11mo agoBy definition it also means your search queries are sent to Yandex, which may be a problem if you are pasting sensitive data there and belong to a risk group
- 11mo ago
- mrweasel 11mo agoI would recommend trying Ecosia, their search have become really good. Better than DuckDuckGo, Bing and Google to be honest. They use a mix of Bing, Google and a few other things, most recently their own index which they collaborate on with Qwants (only for German and French at this point). Originally I switched due to their environmental focus and the way they run the company, but the quality of the results keeps me there. They have their own ! query, like DuckDuckGo. So !maps for Google Maps and !w for Wikipedia.
- fwn 11mo agoWhile I like the general idea of Ecosia (in that it's a less harmful ad-funded service) they do share user IP addresses with their search partners (Google and Microsoft). > We, and our search partners, collect your IP address in order to protect our service against spammers trying to conduct fraud or to up-rank specific search results. Src.: https://www.ecosia.org/privacy https://www.ecosia.org/privacy This shouldn't necessarily stop anyone; I think it should just be mentioned when it is suggested as an alternative to DuckDuckGo. You probably wouldn't switch from a search engine that proxies all favicons to avoid tracking to one that sells your identity to Google and Microsoft for tree-money.
- web3-is-a-scam 11mo agoAll of the brainpower is going into AI. Im expecting a future where we dont have “pages” on the internet anymore, but its just the backbone for generative AI content and if you want to promote your brand you need to pay the AI providers to put your content in responses. Eventually, the entire notion of “searching the web” will be seem as archaic as the rotary phone.
- pogue 11mo agoI've found Brave Search to be quite good. You can disable the AI summaries if you prefer. However, I generally find them very helpful. It's, of course, private similar to DDG. They use their own crawler as well as getting results from Google and other sources. https://brave.com/search/ https://brave.com/search/
- pythux 11mo agoHey, thanks for the kind words. I just wanted to clarify that Brave Search is 100% independent and doesn’t source results from any third -party (see here for more details: https://brave.com/blog/search-independence/ https://brave.com/blog/search-independence/) Disclaimer: I work at Brave
- yegg 11mo agoAll our different search metrics have been up over time, so would love to know more about specifics if you'd care to reach out to me (email in profile) and we can look into it more deeply.
- chongli 11mo agoHow do metrics tell you that a search query produces the result the user really wanted rather than fooling the user or forcing them to settle or even give up? A lot of my queries involve clicking a link and then realizing the site is garbage and just closing the tab.
- yegg 11mo agoAggregate anonymous statistics, for example, requery rates/times, bounce back rates/times, etc.
- chongli 11mo agoSo I submit a query, click a link, then I give up and close the tab. How do you tell that apart from me finding exactly what I wanted and staying there? Whether it's my first query or the 10th (and final) query in a chain of re-queries, you still have no way of knowing when I've found what I wanted or when I've given up.
- yupyupyups 11mo agoMany times it has given me a list of all mainstream news networks rather than what I searched for.
- 1970-01-01 11mo agoThe degradation is on all search engines. Nothing is as good as it once was. Even the pay-for-it search engines are catching junk and floating it to the first page.
- powerapple 11mo agoI have not searched many times these days, I just use mostly ChatGPT..... I don't even verify its answers
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 11mo agoI too have noticed a trough in recent months and decided to make the jump to pay for kagi. Been really happy with it and the incentives are aligned.
- johnisgood 11mo agoBest search engine to find DMCA'd content?