> I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.
I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.
I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.
Putting a sticker on Bing and Yandex results doesn't make a Search company.
For example, if you are discussing manufacturing issues in China, talking about how good drop-shippers on Amazon are is irrelevant.
I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google fully 90% of the time.
A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event.
A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations:
Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark.
I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was - ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.
For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News, coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results.
And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior design, and music, and gets terrible results.
Most likely you care about something that the other person doesn’t, biasing your search results greatly.
I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse.
My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search worse somehow. Perhaps the context and "fanciness" of a search is not something we all value and that's what we're experiencing.
I think alternative search engines would have better chances if they provided alternative interfaces to refine search queries instead of trying to compete with Google/Bing.