It seems there's stuff going on behind the scenes. DDG got taken over by some vested interest, perhaps. Or Bing doing stuff and DDG never branching out of it and just blindly getting results from it.
Either way, it's starting to rival Google in uselessness and I'm likely to stop using it fairly soon.
Kagi seems to work pretty well.
The thing with search engines is: you try one, scan results for 30 seconds, don't find a useful result, curse under your breath and hastily try another search engine. It's a normal programmer flow, which sadly almost completely eliminates the possibility to provide actionable feedback to the search engine's maintainers.
I gather you're from the DDG team? If so, I'd say that the writing is on the wall that Bing is no longer a good backend for DDG. You guys should start branching out because from where I'm standing, many programmers are 10-15 annoyances away from switching.
Again, my apologies for not providing examples.
But I have found the LLM powered Bing, using Skype (!!) as the user interface really compelling
I have played around myself with getting LLMs to summerise and evaluate text for me, and it seemed that an automated way would be very cool.
Then Microsoft implemented it.
Wow. It is very very good
So DDG is still good. Very good. And privacy, a very strong selling point
But wading through click bait websites looking for a website that is not just straining for eyeballs: Bing's LLM based machine is a dogsend!
I would pay for a service like that from DDG. I already pay real money for an OpenAI API key.
Sell me yours. I would much rather pay my money to you
number of Americans without a credit card
panic nova git automation
microvision (the video game console)
time in chicago (seems to be fixed now)
mozilla open directory (seems to be fixed now)
I've too noticed result quality in the main search engines I use (DDG, Brave, Phind) go way down in recent times, I wonder what happened...
This also happens to me and I have found reports on Reddit of it happening to many others.
Sometimes, I cannot even find the original result that I had clicked on, when I return to the search results page.
This drives me crazy.
free for 100 searches. $5/month for 300 searches $10/month for 1,000 searches
I'm not at the point where I feel DDG and Bing are so bad I want to start paying to get better search results. I'd be interested to see how many people are there though.
But I too started getting disgusted by "everything is a subscription" but I might jump the train if I like Kagi enough.
Because apparently the internet companies can't figure out an ad model that's not extremely toxic and does not trample on every single privacy rule the world has (and the 100x more that the world still doesn't have but should not be broken anyway because they should be a moral / ethical no-brainer but alas, go tell that to the "money above everything" types).
But finally, after decades, all the VCs funding internet companies that planned to capture the market with network effects and then start charging, are showing their true colors. I am glad. It makes them more honest and gives the users better information to act on.
Us the nerds just practiced endless bikeshedding and the corporations took over everything in the meantime. Oh, let's not forget the people who kept inventing LISP dialects BECAUSE THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THE WORLD NEEDED!