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?

  • toddestan@lemm.ee
    5·
    5 days ago

    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.

      • LydiaChlamydia@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 days ago

        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

  • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
    81·
    6 days ago

    DuckDuckGo is just a bing proxy. I think Microsoft is working on optimizing it for their copilot thing.

  • wrekone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • JustVik@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    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…

  • Psythik@lemmy.world
    1·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • Camille@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • mihor@lemmy.ml
      0·
      5 days ago

      Indeed, I rarely add !g bang these days, almost never. But I do hate the censorship on DDG, you can rarely find relevant results if you search for anything Russian, or torrents or similar.

      • oldfart@lemm.ee
        1·
        5 days ago

        russian torrents

        As a non-Russian I use Yandex for torrents because there’s nothing better among general use search engines. Also try btdigg if you haven’t.