I'm finding the results are not helpful as they used to be and sometimes way past the topic I'm searching. This is very prevalent when I'm searching for pirate sites. I'm falling back to Searxng whenever this occurs.
Has anyone noticed it too? Has DDG upped their moderation?
I'd say their search results have been in decline for some time now, though quality has taken a particularly big hit the past year or so. I'd switch to someone else, but I haven't found a decent alternative yet. As poor as DDG's results are, they are still a few rungs above the rubbish Google spits out.
I’ve always used SearXNG and I love it. The only issue that every once in a while an instance stops working and you have to switch, I imagine this isn’t an issue if you self host though
In general, I noticed that a significant degradation of search engines began to occur after the appearance of chatGPT, perhaps this is somehow related. Before that, degradation was slower. Maybe in Google for example they were a little afraid that ChatGPT would learn from their search engines and replace them...
Maybe it's a fairness strategy? Rather than show everyone the same list so that only the top 3 get all the clicks, they rotate them to spread the traffic.
DDG's results have always been bad in my experience. Unless I'm searching for the most basic, general stuff, more often than not I find more irrelevant results than relevant ones (if I find any relevant ones at all.)
Not to say that Google is much better. I've noticed a steady decline in relevance over the past 15 years.
These days if I want an actual answer to something, I still have to add site:reddit.com to my queries. That or ask an AI and hope it's not hallucinating some bullshit. It may be full of shit, but at least AI understands what I'm looking for.
Yes, DDG results have seen a major drop in quality in the past 4-6 months. It's been my primary search engine for several years now but I don't know if my loyalty can withstand such a drastic decline. Bing results must have taken a nosedive as well, but I don't use Bing so I can't compare.
They don't show up there for obvious reasons. Also sites disappear frequently, or move to new domains. You have to use alternative ways, bookmark megathreads and other collections where some other people frequently update the links, something for start:
I probably wouldn't use it as a main search engine because I don't know how trustworthy it is, but whenever I can't find some obscure piece of media or something I've had amazing results from Yandex
I've always had a hard time switching from Google to any other search engine because the gap on quality. But since last year, Google's results are getting worse and worse but on the other hand I have found DDG to be quite satisfying. So maybe their results have changed, but for me it was for the better.
In my experience, Google has been to me a better tool to find pirate sites but I got poor results about programming topics there, otherwise, with DuckDuckGo I got excellent results for programming topics but poorly results for pirate sites.
Yep, use to recommend it but it's just got generic even when filters are set to off, also the ai shit is annoying tho I respect them for not shoving it down my throat. I guess I'll just wait for ladybug search engine to drop.
PS: if anyone's looking to compile I'll save you the trouble cause for now it's only a webview in an app. You could go to DDG or google to search but it's not a nice experience
Yes they have. I typically use it to find pages I go to on a regular basis without 'bookmarking'. Used to find them as a first result so much that all I had to do was let the search load and hit the top link. No more. Now there are anywhere between 2 to 5 links above mine on load only passively related.
Because it's just bing under the hood, same as qwant. And Bing/microshaft doesn't really care that much about you using it for actual search. M$hit wants you to use Copilot. Copilot cannot be fit as easily into meta search engines such as SearxNG. I'm quite convinced that the whole push behind the aggressive AI promotion going hand in hand with search engine experience degradation (ACCELERATED BY THE PROLIFERATION OF SEOMAXXING AI-SLOP ONLINE) is to a large extent driven by the desire to tighten the walled gardens and information control. Millions of idiots convinced that a text generator program is somehow similar to an actual person would more readily accept it providing opinions or censored information, in place of diverse information.
Congratulations to all of you still happily trading your freedom for convenience. Instead of just a ranking algorithm that nonetheless can show you multiple results at a glance, you get the generation of just one result, at the environmental cost much higher than a regular search, up to 10 times more energy, and sometimes even slower than what would be the time required to load a regular page on a good LTE connection if modern web wasn't so bloated.
All while accelerating the march towards digital feudalism. Because even the immense amount of storage space and link capacity required to build your own search index is nothing compared to the cost of training a LLM and then providing it via some SaaSS.
Honestly I'm a little worried when the new administration comes in. When the MPAA walks in with a bucket full of money and they decide to Go after torrenting again I don't really want them to see my complete history and my credit balances. When they catch me on TPB they're going to only catch me with whatever I've got my hand on in the cookie jar.
I'm seeing way more ads at the top(at the top 5 of the search) related to the keyword I'm typing. For eg, if I am searching for a movie pirate website I would get ad results at the top which are paid like Netflix, Amazon Prime etc and no results related to the pirate site I'm searching. This is not how it used to be.
I used to find those sites at the top 3 resuls. It was convenient.
Yes duck assist is great and I like Duck ai as well.