No, it’s not just you. DDG hasn’t been very good in my recent experience. I bit the bullet and gave Kagi a try and it’s been excellent. It’s what I recommend now.
It’s not free, but I’ll gladly pay to ensure that I’m the customer being tailored to instead of the product being sold.
Yeah initially it felt silly to pay for a search engine, but I gave kagi a try and really like it. I could immediately turn off all ai shit. I can block websites that are ai trash or that I just plain don’t like or I can just down rank a website so I’ll see other results first. For example, I have the Minecraft fandom website downranked but not blocked so that if I’m searching for something that isn’t documented on the Minecraft wiki then the fandom page will still pop up, it just won’t be the top result ever
Also, I’m on the basic 300 searches a month and I’ve never hit the max despite feeling like I search a lot between my phone and computer
Edit: there’s also a little indicator next to websites that have a lot of trackers and ads so you can avoid or block those sites if you want
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the AI stuff specifically opt-in, not simply easily opt-out as you describe? I’m a (happy) paid subscriber and AI results only occur if I invoke it with the “?” at the end of the search.
Yeah you’re right it’s opt-in. Its been a while since I got kagi so I couldn’t remember which way it was, just that you have full control over whether to use their ai features or not
I’ve been using DDG since the beginning when it was an inferior product to Google, manly because of the bang! search feature (which replaced Yubnub for me) and for the privacy aspect. If a DDG search didn’t give me good results, I could just add !g and see the Google results. It cut down my dependence on Google by about 75% at the time but only got better as the '10s wore on. By 2020 it was just a better search engine.
Since then it seems to be going through the same enshittification that Google went through, although they know that they live & die on their privacy feature and that seems to still be better. Instead, they have added the AI summary (“search assist” is not auto by default, so a basic search doesn’t query the AI), prioritize a few of the top hits on the search (along with context results like wikipedia, dictionary, stock summaries, etc.), but the rest of the results on the first page appear to be paid ranking pages. Below that are related searches, and below that is the “more results” button that is the hits that used to come before the paid ranking pages.
Even though it seems to be sliding into the same patterns as other commercial search engines, I still think it is better than most of the alternatives. I still set it to default some from the browser I can do things like search for RAM on NewEgg (“!ne 16gb crucial ram”) and go directly to that page instead of going to a search results page that may or may not be a sponsored link that takes five seconds to load because of spotty wireless & all of the 3rd party elements having to load.
I think it outperforms both Mojeek and Qwant, so it’s my go to right now. Mojeek has a very small index and Qwant is slower. Haven’t tried Brave or Kagi yet.
Not trying to pick on one thing but I guess I am focusing on it in my reply.
Am I the only person that thinks duck duck Go is no longer worth recommending?
No, it’s not just you. DDG hasn’t been very good in my recent experience. I bit the bullet and gave Kagi a try and it’s been excellent. It’s what I recommend now.
It’s not free, but I’ll gladly pay to ensure that I’m the customer being tailored to instead of the product being sold.
Yeah initially it felt silly to pay for a search engine, but I gave kagi a try and really like it. I could immediately turn off all ai shit. I can block websites that are ai trash or that I just plain don’t like or I can just down rank a website so I’ll see other results first. For example, I have the Minecraft fandom website downranked but not blocked so that if I’m searching for something that isn’t documented on the Minecraft wiki then the fandom page will still pop up, it just won’t be the top result ever
Also, I’m on the basic 300 searches a month and I’ve never hit the max despite feeling like I search a lot between my phone and computer
Edit: there’s also a little indicator next to websites that have a lot of trackers and ads so you can avoid or block those sites if you want
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the AI stuff specifically opt-in, not simply easily opt-out as you describe? I’m a (happy) paid subscriber and AI results only occur if I invoke it with the “?” at the end of the search.
Yeah you’re right it’s opt-in. Its been a while since I got kagi so I couldn’t remember which way it was, just that you have full control over whether to use their ai features or not
Could you please tell me why you dislike it?
I simply feel like search quality has dropped, and I’m no longer able to find quick answers.
That does not mean the competitors are better, it just means ddg is slipping hard imo
I’ve been using DDG since the beginning when it was an inferior product to Google, manly because of the bang! search feature (which replaced Yubnub for me) and for the privacy aspect. If a DDG search didn’t give me good results, I could just add !g and see the Google results. It cut down my dependence on Google by about 75% at the time but only got better as the '10s wore on. By 2020 it was just a better search engine.
Since then it seems to be going through the same enshittification that Google went through, although they know that they live & die on their privacy feature and that seems to still be better. Instead, they have added the AI summary (“search assist” is not auto by default, so a basic search doesn’t query the AI), prioritize a few of the top hits on the search (along with context results like wikipedia, dictionary, stock summaries, etc.), but the rest of the results on the first page appear to be paid ranking pages. Below that are related searches, and below that is the “more results” button that is the hits that used to come before the paid ranking pages.
Even though it seems to be sliding into the same patterns as other commercial search engines, I still think it is better than most of the alternatives. I still set it to default some from the browser I can do things like search for RAM on NewEgg (“!ne 16gb crucial ram”) and go directly to that page instead of going to a search results page that may or may not be a sponsored link that takes five seconds to load because of spotty wireless & all of the 3rd party elements having to load.
I think it outperforms both Mojeek and Qwant, so it’s my go to right now. Mojeek has a very small index and Qwant is slower. Haven’t tried Brave or Kagi yet.