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this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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DuckDuckGo is the future
The idea of it is, but DDG isn't. I used it for a couple of years but rarely felt it was good enough, I kept having to go back to Google or even Bing or Yandex to get the results I needed. One of my major gripes was it not showing the dates on results, so I never knew if the information was up to date without clicking through to every result and checking it there. Then I kept seeing pretty bad news about it, the company doing stuff people, including me, didn't appreciate.
I know some will hate on me for this, but I've now used Kagi for about a year and it's by far the best I've ever used. If or when that goes bad I'll find something else, but right now nothing comes close to giving me both the right results and also giving me control over everything. Of course, there are negatives but that's the case with everything else too. None of the "bad" news about it has turned out to be even close to as bad as first reported, and the rest is just people hating on it because others say they like it.
Oh look, more Kagi shilling.
Its better than google these days. The results are more relevant and relatively unpolluted with AI shit results than google.
I'll use Kagi when my searches aren't associated with my payment info and presumably other fingerprinting.
How much are you using search, and for what that DDG results aren't enough for you?
Duckduckgo suffers a lot of the same problems as google and other search engines. It's just not getting progressively worse as fast as google. It's still been getting worse and worse as time has gone on. I really dislike people who just point to another search engine like it's the end all be all and don't or won't acknowledge that each one has problems and a lot of the problems overlap significantly. None of that fixes the problem or makes any of these companies backtrack on their terrible implementation of anti-user/anti-consumer policies.
Like what?
There are other alternatives as well.
Things like irrelevant results, inaccurate or outdated information, missing or completely incorrect information, or just information that doesn't contextualize the queries properly. For a start. Do you think search engine optimisation is just a google thing or what? Because I have news for you. Seo is a problem for all of the search engines. So are irrelevant results, failure to contextualize queries, and just receiving incorrect or missing information. None of those problems get fixed by switching to duck duck go, or bing or kagi or whatever. Can I avoid the AI LLM BS? Maybe. But having tried alternatives I just don't find them to be particularly better. In some cases, especially for my work I find them to be worse.
Stop saying "alternatives are available". If I search for an AP article using search terms "apnews.com: senator visits Taiwan" I should get news articles from the AP news website. Even if those are from 2014. That's contextually accurate to the search query. I get articles from a fair number of websites and news outlets. I don't want those. Know what I don't get? Articles in chronological order from when they were written, from the AP news website. I don't want anything from twitter or Facebook or Reddit. That's me trying to use a search engine to search a specific website. Same thing happens when I search for a gif on imgur.com using imgur.com: "search query" in the search box.
Years ago I tried to use google and duck duck go and Bing to find information about some nonsense someone at work was spouting about congress attempting to pass a pro child molester bill. Not only could I not find anything relating to where this was being reported and what nonsense they were bastardizing to come to such a ridiculous conclusion, I couldn't even find actual bills relating to things like anti-child molestation legislation. I had to actually search the congress website and then use key words on the website to find what I was looking for.
Try looking for a sort of popular anime from the early 90's that you can't remember the name of. You get a bunch of top ten lists. You get anime that came out well after the time period specified. You get random fanart. You will absolutely not get the anime you're looking for unless it was really really popular. The alternatives all give varying degrees of the same results.
For me it's worse than Google. About half the time I have to run the search again in Google because none of the DDG links are relevant to my query.