I’m finding the results are not helpful as they used to be and sometimes way past the topic I’m searching. This is very prevalent when I’m searching for pirate sites. I’m falling back to Searxng whenever this occurs.

Has anyone noticed it too? Has DDG upped their modera

  • Psythik@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    DDG’s results have always been bad in my experience. Unless I’m searching for the most basic, general stuff, more often than not I find more irrelevant results than relevant ones (if I find any relevant ones at all.)

    Not to say that Google is much better. I’ve noticed a steady decline in relevance over the past 15 years.

    These days if I want an actual answer to something, I still have to add site:reddit.com to my queries. That or ask an AI and hope it’s not hallucinating some bullshit. It may be full of shit, but at least AI understands what I’m looking for.

  • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
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    20 days ago

    DuckDuckGo is just a bing proxy. I think Microsoft is working on optimizing it for their copilot thing.

  • janonymous@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    I also noticed a change. From one day to the next I suddenly got lots of reddit links in the top results

    • Samsy@lemmy.ml
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      20 days ago

      I had the same and just realised that the order of the results got rearranged.

    • MonkeyBusiness@sh.itjust.works
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      19 days ago

      Maybe it’s a fairness strategy? Rather than show everyone the same list so that only the top 3 get all the clicks, they rotate them to spread the traffic.

  • JustVik@lemmy.ml
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    20 days ago

    In general, I noticed that a significant degradation of search engines began to occur after the appearance of chatGPT, perhaps this is somehow related. Before that, degradation was slower. Maybe in Google for example they were a little afraid that ChatGPT would learn from their search engines and replace them…

        • Found some python code that can act as a openai api proxy. Wrote an ai agent with langchain search tools persistent memory image generators sandboxed code execution environment calculator etc. Use an uncensored llm via openrouters, openai api for vector embedding, locality hosted stable diffusion. Locally hosted searxng. Then i can use any openai api compatable frontend and just point it at my proxy and have an advanced agent in almost any environment.

          Havnt published it yet was thinking i could give it an autogpt or baby agi backend but havnt had any success with that yet.

  • toddestan@lemm.ee
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    19 days ago

    I’d say their search results have been in decline for some time now, though quality has taken a particularly big hit the past year or so. I’d switch to someone else, but I haven’t found a decent alternative yet. As poor as DDG’s results are, they are still a few rungs above the rubbish Google spits out.

      • LydiaChlamydia@lemmy.world
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        19 days ago

        I’ve always used SearXNG and I love it. The only issue that every once in a while an instance stops working and you have to switch, I imagine this isn’t an issue if you self host though

  • oni@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    In my experience, Google has been to me a better tool to find pirate sites but I got poor results about programming topics there, otherwise, with DuckDuckGo I got excellent results for programming topics but poorly results for pirate sites.

  • ramble81@lemm.ee
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    20 days ago

    Are there any search engine aggregators which can pull the top X sites from multiple locations and display them on a single page?

  • wrekone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    19 days ago

    Yes, DDG results have seen a major drop in quality in the past 4-6 months. It’s been my primary search engine for several years now but I don’t know if my loyalty can withstand such a drastic decline. Bing results must have taken a nosedive as well, but I don’t use Bing so I can’t compare.

  • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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    20 days ago

    Because it’s just bing under the hood, same as qwant. And Bing/microshaft doesn’t really care that much about you using it for actual search. M$hit wants you to use Copilot. Copilot cannot be fit as easily into meta search engines such as SearxNG. I’m quite convinced that the whole push behind the aggressive AI promotion going hand in hand with search engine experience degradation (ACCELERATED BY THE PROLIFERATION OF SEOMAXXING AI-SLOP ONLINE) is to a large extent driven by the desire to tighten the walled gardens and information control. Millions of idiots convinced that a text generator program is somehow similar to an actual person would more readily accept it providing opinions or censored information, in place of diverse information.

    Congratulations to all of you still happily trading your freedom for convenience. Instead of just a ranking algorithm that nonetheless can show you multiple results at a glance, you get the generation of just one result, at the environmental cost much higher than a regular search, up to 10 times more energy, and sometimes even slower than what would be the time required to load a regular page on a good LTE connection if modern web wasn’t so bloated.

    All while accelerating the march towards digital feudalism. Because even the immense amount of storage space and link capacity required to build your own search index is nothing compared to the cost of training a LLM and then providing it via some SaaSS.

  • Camille@lemmy.ml
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    20 days ago

    I’ve always had a hard time switching from Google to any other search engine because the gap on quality. But since last year, Google’s results are getting worse and worse but on the other hand I have found DDG to be quite satisfying. So maybe their results have changed, but for me it was for the better.

    • mihor@lemmy.ml
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      19 days ago

      Indeed, I rarely add !g bang these days, almost never. But I do hate the censorship on DDG, you can rarely find relevant results if you search for anything Russian, or torrents or similar.

      • oldfart@lemm.ee
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        19 days ago

        russian torrents

        As a non-Russian I use Yandex for torrents because there’s nothing better among general use search engines. Also try btdigg if you haven’t.

  • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
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    20 days ago

    DDG is a proxy for bing. If bing is getting worse, that’s why.

    Also you fucking kids and your “piracy”. As if you are some kind of independent trailblazer on an adventure to take what you want. Bullshit. You are a bunch of punks violating copyright. But more importantly, you are a consumer of the same swill of the masses that you would claim to be independent of. The only difference is you don’t pay for it. You aren’t free. You are just as shackled as the rest of them.

    I gladly accept my downvotes.

    • ComradeMiao@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      What a trash take. Piracy has existed forever, why’re you acting like you’re mature and know better than OP? Nothing immoral about piracy is this age. People can’t pirate what they want to watch? It has to be some extremely grassroots local film only?

    • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
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      20 days ago

      I’m conflicted on which Simpsons meme to post. Either the “Old man yells at cloud”, or the “No, it’s the children who are wrong”