Any search engine is good enough, but no one, centralized or decentralized, is even close to Google.
Google is our wonder and our curse.
Google is our wonder and our curse.
For a while I would switch back to google when my searches failed and I wanted to check if the duck was getting me equivalent or better answers. In the past year and a half I've completely stopped. It is simply a high-quality product that exceeds google in what it offers.
Maybe you'll respond that "it just doesn't 'feel' high quality". OK, I can't argue with that because it's your opinion... but as long as we collectively decide to believe this fantasy we will continue to be locked into the search juggernaut. You can help improve the diversity of options by using something different and get to use a better product.
The only thing that I can't do on the duck is search academic papers. Google scholar is still the best thing of its type.
(Yes, you may say it has DuckDuckBot, but ask around people who run websites if they've ever seen a hit from it.)
Maybe Google makes the best bread, but it might be true that someone might make a sandwich on inferior bread that makes for a better overall snack.
And there's less than ten bakeries world-wide.
And if the sandwich maker actually got popular enough that people would only buy from them, then the bakeries would indeed give them the finger.
I think that's just a matter of habits. Initially, it feels a bit unusual and maybe even uncomfortable to use not the search engine you've got used to. But after some time you understand that now Google is the one that is uncomfortable for you.
That's simply not true. Things we take for granted like true multi-query search and sub-second results speeds simply aren't seen in distributed search engines.