DDG has really dropped off in quality over the last couple of years. I'm about ready to try that paid search engine that keeps being mentioned here on HN.
May I ask when you switched away from Brave Search? We've been doing work to reduce the amount of captchas a few months ago and we stopped getting feedback about this issue at that point. If it's still happening, it's something we will look into again.
Also, are you a user of ProtonVPN by any chance?
Thanks for your help,
You are presumably using the "Clear on Exit" feature, located within settings at brave://settings/clearBrowserData. When you select the "On Exit" tab of that view, which options do you have selected? Do you find that none of the data types are cleared when you close the browser (via › Exit), or only some of them are cleared?
I'm also curious about the state of two options within brave://settings/system, namely "Close window when closing last tab," and "Warn me before closing window with multiple tabs". Are both of these enabled?
Thank you in advance
Realistically I think it has more to do with the terms your searching for, and not necessarily if one search engine is worse hit by spam, AI or otherwise.
DDG and Google are both open when I'm looking for stock images for flash cards.
I switched to a different search engine (brave) to get away from it, the result quality seems about the same for english, but not as good for other languages- it's not amazing but it'll do
Over the last 12 months or so I was getting that problem with Google, but they seem to have realised that a lot of people were saying that and changed. Whatever Google did wrong for my searches a year ago — and perhaps even that was "not keeping ahead in the race against hostile SEO" — it's entirely possible DDG is doing wrong for your searches right now.