I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
they’re pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I’m getting actual results.
Yeah DDG is great. The only thing I find is its not good at local results but a quick !g on the end gets me the local results im looking for.
What does !g do? Add Google results?
Redirects your search to Google. You can put it anywhere in the search; for example
!g how do i shot web,how do i shot web !gandhow do i !g shot webwill all land you into Google.There are other 13k (yup) bangs like this. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Yahoo, Quora, most gaming wikis, etc. A few sites (like Google and Bing) have multiple bangs, that land you directly into a specific page (e.g. !bv searches Bing videos). More info here.
*how do i shot web
It’s an older meme, but it checks out.
I’ll fix it! I forgot that this is like “an hero”, one of those memes where the error is part of the charm.
Bang Bang
If you’re using ddg without !bangs - you’re only having half the fun.
!w Wikipedia
!imdb IMDb
!gi Google images
there’s tons more. if ddg is the default search engine these bangs save you the time to go to the site first and click the search bar. basically changing your default search into a specific search.
oh, good tip. I didn’t know about that.
you tack !g to the end of whatever the resulting search URL is?
Can be anywhere in the search.
“cute dogs !g” “!g cute dogs” “cute !g dogs”
Those all work the same, though clearly one is more cursed than the others. They have those for a bunch of other sites as well, for example if you want to search YouTube specifically/directly you can use !yt but I can’t kick the habit of just going to those sites first and then searching directly on there.
Yes DDG Bangs are a great fast way of getting around the web. Works really well with LibRedirect. Here’s a Full List of DDG Bangs.
That’s how I felt until about a month ago, now ddg is really useless
Holy shit the bangs work at the end of the search query too!? I’ve always painfully pressed Home on my keyboard to add a !g whenever I realise I had better searched this on Google
I prefer DDG, but I hate the news search. 90% of the results are paywalled.
Oh, and sometimes the image search will return a pile of porn for a seemingly clean search request. I once searched for “R34 Skyline” expecting Nissans, and got VERY different results without safe search.
Searching for R34 is on you. Naming something R34 is on Nissan. The popularity of R34 is on all of us.
R34 is also short for rule 34 - “if it exists, there’s porn of it on the internet”
So if you search R34 and anything, you’ll get porn.
Now I want to see some skyline porn
deleted by creator
News orgs clinging to tradition.
i use archive.is for anything I really want to read.
most news is fluffy bullshit anyway.
Agree. It’s an important part of media literacy these days.
For political news, I’m only interested in what was actually said, not what is reported to be said .
It’s just that Bing/DDG seem to promote news from these sites as if they’re sponsored links… but without the disclosure.
bummer.
I see all the labeled sponsored links on Bing, but I generally get high quality results outside of those.
I’m pretty sure here in the states, a site is obligated to identify ad content and sponsored content, so when a big company like Microsoft or Alphabet is doing it (Bing and Google) it makes me wonder if there’s been a recent carve-out or relaxation of the reg.
That makes the return adversarial to the end-user, hence the point of the regulations.
Every search engine I’ve encountered is weird about porn. At first it decides whether or not you’re looking for porn or not looking for porn. If it assumes you are then all the actual porn hits are promoted to the top, where non-porn hits are down-ranked. Vice versa, if it decides you’re not looking for porn.
Once of the fun search engine games is to find out what sets of ambiguous words trigger the porn flag. Pure tended to be one due to a brand name, even when I was looking for pure minerals at the time. Siri created some conflicts, since there’s both a well known LLM digital assistant, rule 34 for the same and a popular porn star.
I’d really like a search engine that let porn sites fall in the hit list without deciding first whether I was trying to look for porn, since I sometimes do metasearching.
You know that’s just Bing, right?
is it? that kind of makes sense, because I still use Bing occasionally while Google is completely out of rotation, although I don’t find Bing as good as duckduckgo.
edit: it is not! looks like the DuckDuckGo search engine is an aggregate of hundreds of search engines, including their own duck duck bot, excluding Google but including some Bing results.
Their FAQ hems and haws about that, but (in the past) I’ve done side-by-side tests and found identical results. Maybe something’s changed, maybe it hasn’t.
it must have done by now, then, I get different results from identical prompts in DuckDuckGo and Bing although both are usually relevant.
“DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.”
are you having trouble finding something specifically or you just don’t like the quality of the search results you’re finding in general?
definitely if you’re still on Google, stop using it.
It’s completely useless at this point.