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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Same experience with DuckDuckGo. I've probably been using it as my primary search engine for, well, I'm not absolutely sure, but I want to say it was sometime during the pandemic so that must be, what, 5 years?

Honestly, it's got to the point where 8 or 9 times out of 10 I switch to Google search because I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting... and really it's at the point where, why am I even still using it?

It's just not very good.

It reminds of something like AltaVista back in the day, or one of those other old skool search engines, with how poor its results are relative to evil old Google.

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Do you find the results are better when you use the same query on Google? Because I’ve also exclusively used DuckDuckGo for the past 5 or so years, and every now and then I get frustrated by the results try Google.

But only once did Google actually give me what I was looking for. Every other time the Google results were the same SEO garbage I was getting with DDG.

Maybe I should try switching to Google for a full month to see if my search quality generally improves.

I’ve been using DDG since they started. But still often use !g.

But I think the AI overviews in DDG and even Google have helped a lot.

AI has helped search tremendously. I only search for things that should have exact answers.

What I found was that when I first started using DDG, using !g to take me to Google would get good results. But over time, it stopped working. I'm not totally sure if it's because Google's profile on me timed out and it's not getting enough searches or because Google search quality has gone down. Now, several years into using DDG as primary, when I can't find it at DDG, I expect I won't find it at Google either... but they do give me different bad results.

Yeah, same queries. Results are (mostly) much better with Google. It's honestly disappointing because I'd love to be able to ditch Google as a search engine but, whilst it's not without its flaws, it's still much better than the alternatives[0].

[0] I'm deliberately avoiding talking about LLMs here: I mean specifically in cases where what I want to do is execute a web search - often because I'm dissatisfied with, or suspicious of, something an LLM has told me.

Lol this is the same thing that's been repeated about DDG for over a decade. I had the same exact complaints and eventually switched back to Google since I was using !g bangs so often, and that was when I was in high school. Which is why, when I learned about Kagi I switched and never looked back. Even as a "casual" user I still find value because of the lack of obnoxious ads and control I have over boosting or blocking sites from my results completely.

Yeah, was going to ask - I had the same experience with DDG, but with Kagi, I’ve never once been tempted to switch back, even though I have to pay for Kagi.

Huh, I've been using DDG for years now, and I maybe use !g a few times a year.

It used to be the case that shopping was way better using Google than DDG, but Google seems to have enshitified that now, and it seems to mostly show me deals on different models than I searched for.

These days when DDG fails me, I usually find Google does too.

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