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Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Yeah, DDG skips all the sponsored links but I generally find what I'm looking for faster on Google if I just skip half the page rather than trying to find the right incantation to bring up what I'm looking for on DDG.
I've tried, many times over the years, to use DDG and you are 100% spot-on. I find it damn-near impossible to find what I need without some deep voodoo magic to somehow craft the perfect query. It's been a decade+ since I've gone to page 2 of a Google search. Using DDG I can be 3 or 4 pages deep before maybe finding the answer. There is SOOO much irrelevant stuff to filter through.
It sucks, I don't want to use Google, but there doesn't seem to be a great alternative.
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I swear I’m going to capture screenshots of 2-3 dozen searches across DDG & Google, as well as hopefully Bing, Startpage… SearXNG…
b/c DDG is doodoo while corporate overlord Google is great with Ublock Origin.
Faithfully perform every search on DDG first in the hopes I can keep the data out of Google’s hands! But
!gout half the time.—
Anybody know of a site, app, or TamperMonkey script that’ll search multiple search engines side-by-side?
In the meantime, one example w/a direct quote from deep inside a Harry Potter book:
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You know DDG is just a wrapper around Bing right? No point comparing the two.
Not entirely true, they have their own index they use to augment/modify the results with. Like the paper linked in this very post shows, actually.
Works on SearX
Honestly it's been a yearish since I've tried and my memory is shit so I don't have any specific examples I can give now. In general though the bulk of my searches involve:
I'm sure there are more, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Tbh using DDG is more like using old (and I mean old) Google. Googling things used to be a skill people had. You googled things for other people because they had no idea how to get good results. That's exactly how DDG is. It takes rewiring your brain to use it, and I've been using it for a year now.
I do go to Google sometimes. Specifically for opening hours in stores, and when I'm trying to look for products from smaller online stores I do not yet know of, which takes me to page 3-4 of Google but would've taken me far longer on DDG.
The country switch on DDG is a godsend because you can manipulate searches with it and get some really specific results if you know what you're doing. It's the learning curve that makes DDG worse if you just want to find something without having to teach yourself to search. Which is definitely a point to Google, but if you want a very specific result it's better to battle that learning curve.
I should also add that I'm not really anti Google in any way. I just stopped finding what I was looking for about 70% of the time, and instead found products and shit to consume. It's very useful for that stuff, but I never find obscure tech solutions with Google.
All true. DDG is my default search engine now. Yeah. I use others often enough, Google, Bing, searXNG…but I find that if I can’t find it relatively easily on DDG it means I’m going to have to sift through a bunch of SEO sites and sponsored links on Google to find it. It won’t be much easier. One of the most frustrating thing about Google is the “fuck you” they’ve given to search modifiers. The “-“ and quotes are pretty much meaningless. For instance one can enter an error code from a program, perfectly quoted, and Google will tell you there aren’t any good search results. BS. They just can’t figure out how to jam ads into what you’re looking for or something. Bing or DDG will return what you need, it might just be on page 2.
Google really has failed as a search engine.
I find that DDG is terrible at finding anything regionally specific, probably because I'm not in the US. I always get a shitload of US hits and usually some German hits if I try to specify location...neither are useful to me.
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I mean, kagi is great. I too got frustrated with the shittiness of DDG and others like ecosia. Paying for a search engine sounds crazy but I’m not going back. Google’s results are absolutely terrible compared to kagi so 🤷♀️
!sp is something like ddg for bing, but it is based on google
just use a
!gif you don't get what you want the first time on ddg and you'll still get a proxied google search result.AFAIK !g on DDG doesn't proxy anything.
It does on SearXNG
nothing gets proxied, it's just like searching directly on Google.
Would you be able to give an example of what you couldn't find with DDG that was simpler to find with the help of Google? Sounds interesting to me, as I use DDG pretty much exclusively.
I don't remember the specific case, most of the things I Google are local businesses. I find for local businesses Google is a top tier resource. Google can tell me how busy a business is right now, or if they're closed because of the weather. I often have to do some digging to find the business' page on DDG, if they have one. If I'm looking for a local contractor, like a water heater or drywall repair guy, the ads aren't even that intrusive, they're literally what I'm looking for. On DDG, I've got to do some clicking to find a contractor and then all the reviews are on Yelp. General contractors will have a list sometimes on DDG, but it's not all that helpful, I've never seen a phone number without clicking once or twice.
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But on the flipside, if that data were publically owned and anonymized I'd genuinely want that kept. Since the feature is super useful. Same with busses and so on.
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