Compared to a few years ago, it’s better. Some websites still aren’t indexed, and even by entering their name exactly, they don’t show. Google doesn’t have this problem.

Brave search is also pretty good

Good enough for me, although there are times I need to use google.

I like DDG a lot more, especially because of the bang shortcuts. But I transitioned recently to Qwant. It also has bang shortcuts and is hosted in Europe.

It’s just as good as 2008 google, which is all I want.

Yes, I switched back in 2023 and noticed it was already better than google.

All major search engines feel like they’re either filled with AI slop results, or just only returning major corporations’ sites anymore, though. DDG just falls into the latter, while Google is mostly the former.

It’s my primary but Google unfortunately is often a fallback. And Google is tracking the shit out of us these days. Certain obscure searches don’t work well on DDG, sad to say.

Naw. I use Kagi (paid) now, and get much better search results.

no. i switch to using it as my primary search engine every once in a while, just to see how it’s doing. i always run into situations where i can’t find the thing im looking for. maybe im just the obscure searches man

Probably so. Haven’t used it much but Google has got so much worse. Being filled with adds and irrelevant results that DuckDuckgo probably is better now.

I’ve been using DDG since 2016 and never felt it was worse in terms of “search quality” than Google.

Especially nowadays I hear friends whine near weekly about Google, but it’s still somehow “better than DDG”.

Honestly people just make excuses not to change what they’re use to. Even if what they’re used to has changed around them for the worse.

My only real complain I have is I wish ‘search by date range’ was less finicky use and also worked in the image tab like it does in Google images.

Don’t you mean DuckDuckBing ?

As a general purpose search engine yeah it’s just as good. Google has some nice extra features which aren’t too important (for example if you search UFC it shows full fight card info and results on the search page).

Where it falls behind is for more "power user " type work. I only use Google at work as it makes finding very specific results with keywords and date ranges on certain sites etc much easier.

Nowadays I use Qwant though to boycott us. It’s much slower but still does the job for day to day use.

It has been for several years now. I rarely use Google now, and when I do, I’m using it out of DuckDuckGo (!g)

I’d say the same. Google dorks work much better than DDG’s filters for site-specific stuff, and generally for things like "search term" but for general searches DDG seems pretty similar.

The only things I’ve also had worse performance from DDG on compared to Google (in very minimal ways) has been:

• Highly specific searches (e.g. searching for a diagram of the dimensions of common connector types, DDG shows side-by-sides of connectors, Google does that but also with more diagrams that have dimensions in them)
• Context but not keyword based searches (e.g. “thing that has x y and z characteristics” returns more relevant results in Google than DDG, very marginally)

And of course, there’s always the !s bang to run a search through Startpage (which uses Google) if I’m not getting enough detail.

Definitely not; DDG has always been bad. However, as others have pointed out, Google is getting worse and every day. That said, it’s still better than DDG, which isn’t saying much.

There are no good search engines anymore. I got tired of having to add site:reddit.com to all or my searches to get actual answers, so now I’ve resorted to using AI and pretending that it isn’t just making up half the shit it spews. Perplexity is a half decent replacement for a search engine; it’s more accurate than most and it cites its sources:

https://lemmy.world/post/26764870