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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

Over the past several months I find Google search has become completely useless to find anything other than online retailers. I thought it may have been just something about my profile, but this article suggests it may have been an update on their end.

Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.

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DDG was such an absolutely subpar experience for me (used it for 6-8 months) that it wouldn't surprise me if nobody would _actually_ say it's better in a blind test. They just don't like Google.

Kagi on the other hand really blew me away, I have no idea how they're doing it, but I'm only using Google for one thing these days (besides G Shopping & G Maps) which is when I want to use ad spend as proxy for quality/reliability of the company (for example when I'm looking for a local moving company in my city).

I only use Google for local search results (news or businesses) as well. Otherwise I'm also very happy with the quality of results I get from Kagi.

That is a great idea. What have you used it for? How do you get the spend data?

I use both DDG and Google (via ddg shortcuts)

DDG is best for literal quick searches and Google for open ended questions or complicated queries

Never had issues with either really

having used ddg for more than 5 years, i'd only agree with your sentiments in the first year or so. at first, i'd just use the bangs feature and do real search on google using !g bang. but for past few years i am exclusively searching on ddg. the only exception being searching travel directions.

a lot of search people do can be done in domain-specific websites, which ddg bangs allow you to do with ease. i am surprised to see that people are driven enough to pay for search before fully making the most of ddg.

Since 2015 I made some futile attempts to switch to DDG, and mostly used google, but last year I noticed myself using DDG 90% of times, because DDG got far better, and G turned in a page of junk, or showing generic stuff instead of specific. G spectacularly shot itself in the foot.

> Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.

I’ve been using ddg since around 2016, but in the past few months I realize that brave gives me better results and Kagi even still better. So I’m switching to brave/Kagi combo. Brave for when i need to find easy stuff and Kagi when really need to find something.

Agree on that Kagi's better.

I don't see the point in using DDG. Brave Search is a superior replacement.

I try to live my values, so I can't use it. It's a rare case where I really do have a choice.

If you value paying money for a good product I’d say kagi is the answer. It is definitely worth its cost if you can afford it.

One metareason to pay for Kagi is to demonstrate to the business world that there's a market for paid, quality search.

Switched to DDG a few months ago and find myself having to switch to Google for many searches. Going to give kagi a try after trialing it.

I first switched to ddg but kept using !g because I often wasn't satisfied. Since I've switched to kagi, I barely ever fallback to google (only sometimes for very local results)

I switched to DDG a while ago because Google thought I was a bot.

Capchas, every single search! It kept telling me I was wrong when I tried to solve them.

I'm on a popular ISP in India, my guess is that one of their IP ranges got blacklisted somehow.

Between DDG and ChatGPT, I haven't looked back.

Part of the pitch for using DDG is that you can easily query Google or Google images (!g !gi etc) or tons of other search engines or just use the regular bing search for basic stuff

It’s more of a privacy friendly search platform than a total replacement for Google

Yeah, I remember how it felt when I first used Google. You could search something like "xck-956-fg" and some obscure part would show up. Obviously they have amazing technology as some of that "magic" is still there when you can search items by just taking a picture, so this is a choice on their part to have horrible search.

I use Kagi now as I can tune my searches with rankings and the results are quite good. I am sure Google could create the best and most amazing search experience with little effort. I would happily pay $20 a month for that service.

For now, Kagi and LLMs have brought some of the utility back for search and I am optimistic as the technology of AI improves that information retrieval will significantly improve as search providers will be forced to compete and the technology will evolve

> Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.

As long as Bing is running

I have a different perception, really. They are promoting more the Reddit results in the last months and, at least for me, I'm able to find faster what I want.

Now it’ll be a matter of time before Reddit gets an order of magnitude more bots and spam.

Kagi is miles better then google, i've been using it for nearly a year now. Worth the subscription.

Duckduckgo is garbage for my niche (entertainment). SEO wordpressed articles up at the top of every search. Looks like it puts even more weight on backlinks in its algorithm to me and as such is even more vulnerable to gaming/timing.

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