Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn’t see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?
Does anyone care to explain the possible reason for downvoting this - is there something I am not aware of wrt DDG?
It’s based on Bing from what I recall, and it’s not necessarily the most accurate engine. I tried it for a few months and couldn’t replace Google with it unfortunately.
Thank you for explaining! And now I am getting downvoted for asking an honest question, so that I can learn more, sheesh. Ignoring the fact for the moment that the Fediverse is becoming more Reddi-fied all the time… I appreciate you actually taking the time to answer.
I actually swap back and forth between Google and DDG. For things like local business hours, Image search and Maps, the former finds the better results. For a few things (that it may consider piracy?), Google refuses to find results even on page 10. For most other things, while the SEOs may not have entirely taken over, they at least have risen to an extremely annoying prominence.
e.g. try searching for the word “inspire”, and rather than offer you the dictionary definition, the top hit (for me right now) is the “Inspire” sleep apnea innovation - which nowhere is labelled as an advertisement:-(. I understand that the latter company would like to subvert the normal rules of politeness & etiquette and replace my prioritization so that their name appears at the very tippy-top of the search (possibly locally, or perhaps even world-wide?), but that doesn’t mean that that is what *I* wanted. Which is why more & more often these days I go to DDG first and then Google, rather than the other way around which is what I did until very recently.
But yeah, sometimes I do legit use Google search too.
DuckDuckGo
I used to have to put !g (redirect to Google) on like half my searches to get the results I wanted. These days, I actually generally prefer DDG’s results over Google’s.
Searxng
Searxng.
I’m just annoyed by the regions issues, you’ll get pretty biased results depending in what region you select.
If you try to search for something specific to a region with other selected you’ll find sometime empty results, which shows you won’t get relevant results about a search if you don’t properly select the region.
Probably this is more obvious with non technical searches, for example my default region is canada-en and if I try “instituto nacional electoral” I only get a wiki page, an international site and some other random sites with no news, only when I change the region I get the official page ine.mx and news. For me this means kagi hides results from other regions instead of just boosting the selected region’s ones.
I am not affiliated with the writer in any way.
