So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years.
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are, and how it’s trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
How long has Google been this bad?
For many years now, almost the only way to find tech-related answers was to add the word “reddit” to your search. Before the Rexodus ofc.
Nowadays a lot of people go straight to where they wanted to find info - Wikipedia, StackOverflow, IMDB, etc. - and search from there.
Google itself has admitted how bad it has gotten, and in response they decided to voluntarily reduce their profits and return everything back to when it all worked… - no I’m just kidding, they said wait a bit and AI will save us all, somehow (from ourselves?).
Nowadays a lot of people go straight to where they wanted to find info - Wikipedia, StackOverflow, IMDB, etc. - and search from there.
Didn’t people always do this, though? If I want to find something on Wikipedia, why wouldn’t I search on Wikipedia for it? I have Firefox configured so that it searches Wikipedia when I type “wiki” then a space then the search query.
Okay but do you also do that for StackOverflow? And if so, then also for IMDB, and everything else? Google invested heavy effort to get people to not even remember or bookmark URLs - simply type “Wikipedia” into the bar and it would do a quick search to translate that into something, perhaps https://www.wikipedia.org/ or even https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Later, browsers started allowing other ways like searching through your locally stored bookmarks, but that doesn’t change how Google pushed heavily and first towards being your one-stop place to find what you want just by thinking about it and typing a word or two. Their summaries of movies I find far superior to IMDB, and even to Wikipedia, if all I want is like the most famous movie or two from a particular actor/actress to think - “oh, that’s where I know them from!”
You resisted that trend, which was inefficient, and introduced another dependency of Google to something that did not need it in the chain of finding results that you expected to be found on Wikipedia, so good on you. But not everyone did that.
Likewise, adding “Reddit” to a query added another purpose: if you knew you wanted a search result from Reddit specifically, then finding it via Google was far easier than trying to use Reddit’s internal search, which remains extremely poorly implemented. A lot of places use Google searches internally, and if not then they rely on Google externally, to help find content in them. And why not, bc Google “wasn’t evil”, unlike e.g. Microsoft or questionably (at the time) Apple? So bc everything tied back to Google regardless, why not get the full Google experience? Or so I imagine the thinking went.
But no, I don’t think “people” meaning “everyone” already went straight to where they wanted to search, and even those of us who did (I also most often went straight to Wikipedia, depending on what I was searching for, bc it has fairly good internal search capabilities) did not do it for everything or even perhaps for most things - the latter measured as width of categorizations as in breadth of variety of info - even if not numerically as in “most searches performed”. Google was extremely prominent and central for most people, especially those who did not think about how prominent and central it had become.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Read for the exact timeline
That is an amazing read. Thank you!
Insane. Thanks for sharing.
I noticed it getting worse over the years. I switched to SearXNG last year when I felt Google was getting really ridiculous.
They started censoring a lot at some point, maybe because they had to, but that’s not the only reason.
I’ve been trying to get used to DDG recently and while I’ve definitely noticed the decline of Google, that decline has been subtle for me, it hasn’t become a disaster, it’s just generally frustrating and just not as good as it used to be. But that said, I haven’t exactly loved DDG in comparison. It’s okay, definitely works, recent outage excepted, but I often found the results kind of needed more work to make use of, they were more kind of, on the topic of what I asked for rather than specifically what I asked within the domain of that topic. It’s more like using a search engine as one would have done some 15 or so years ago. Often if trying to find something out I’d be disappointed by the non specific or irrelevant results and get suspicious and try changing back to google for the same thing and found that though they largely contained the same results, Google would have one or two that DDG didn’t which were closer to the top of the results and were more specifically about my precise query than just the general topic. I think these tend to be things like forum posts where, if my query is a question, someone’s asked basically that exact or very similar question.
I think DDG is mostly working ok enough for me that I’ll persevere but I can’t say it’s been better.
I don’t know, been on Kagi for a year so forgot Google.
Looks nice, do you recommend it? Why not use ddg?
I use it, and like it. They dropped prices a while back so now you can get unlimited searches for $10 a month (they also have a $5 limited tier and a free trial).
First thing is I’d like to live in a world where search engines (and the internet in general) don’t have to be ad supported. This is a different model so I want to support it.
But also Kagi has some nice features. My favourite is how I can block Pinterest, and boost the ranking of other sites like Wikipedia. Basically you can have some control over search results.
If you’re familiar with SearxNG, that’s basically how Kagi works. They run the searches on a bunch of search engines and then present one cohesive search results page. But SearxNG for me takes several seconds to get the results, and Kagi is almost instant.
I don’t know if it’s significantly better than the free options, but I like using it and it’s pretty cheap really.
Not OP, but I copy my reply from the last time someone asked an opinion on kagi:
I use it, but to be honest I did not do a comprehensive comparison. I like it mostly for the fine grained website control. For work and some personal stuff I often look for code and can push websites like GitHub to appear more often. Or I can block Pinterest in my search results. I tried to do this in SearXNG, but this was too much of a hassle so in a way I pay kagi for convenience. I recently got a new job and will evaluate in the coming months if it is still worth the money, but right now I am satisfied. Nobody else I know would pay for a search engine, so I can understand the stance, but I am really fed up with all the advertising and enshitification so I thought why not give it a try. And yes, because it was recommended here.
Kagi is just excellent so I guess that’s why. It’s so good I completely forgot about Google when I tried it.
I used ddg a few years back too but I always had to use Google for certain queries and never felt fully satisfied with the search results. It felt like a worse search engine that I was using because I didnt want to use Google.
With Kagi it’s the opposite. It’s a better search engine than Google. It’s Google results without the dark patterns and hostile behavior from google.
How do you use it on mobile? I’ve seen there’s no mobile app
Just set Kagi as default search in your browser. There is a plugin you can install that does it, easiest way.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html
i have the opposite problem. ive aways had to go back to google becasue DDG sucks so hard… and now i find out its because its bing-based. awesome.
Same here. I switched to DDG last year, but had to go back within two weeks; it was just too annoying.
Google search results have indeed gotten pretty bad, but I’ve yet to see anyone surpass them.
It’s been bad for a few years at least but it has gotten even worse recently, I assume due to incorporating AI/LLM’s into the mix.
Google is great if you want to buy things. It’s absolutely shit for information gathering.
Id argue it’s also shit for buying things because it will only give you products with paid ads. It’s useless to discover adjacent products or finding different sources.
And in web search when searching for a product it gives you dozens of “product tests” pages that are actually paid SEO articles. No, that page that shares a name with a newspaper has not actually tested what the best dishwasher in 2024 is.
Hahaha, I ~just came after a search using g**gle due to ddgo being down, I noticed the “web” search is no longer the default (as it was discussed some days ago here).
Google seems to have a huge grip on people and they don’t seem to notice (or act against) the terrible services of google search…
They didn’t make that the default. What was discussed was a way to make it default (add https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 as a custom search engine)
And the comments on those posts said we should actually use DDG instead lol
^This is for anyone who doesn’t know, click on the web button in the “More” drop down list after making a search to get the old style search results instead of the new ones. People mentioned this in the thread earlier so I thought I’d make it clear.
I think it’s been years now. At least a couple of years, I was baffled too back in the day.
Google started getting really bad about a year ago
I‘m using searx.be most of the time. Safari wont allow it so I got confronted with ddg being down today. Still only use google if something is unfindable (mostly niche computer stuff).
Feels like about 6 months or so? If I do an image search it only seems to pull items linking to a retail site. Everything is about sales and I can’t find information.
