Using Google whilst Duck Duck Go is down. How long has Google been this bad?

I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I'm wrong.

If you're using DDG for privacy, then indeed you are wrong.

It may be "less invasive" than google, but it's neither anonymous, nor private.

Here's a bunch more reasons from techrights.org, a site dedicated to digital freedom and exposing corruption.

Direct privacy abuse:

DDG was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.

DDG’s app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (reaction).

DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)

DDG is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers.

When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default browser.

DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium."

CloudFlare:

DDG promotes one of the largest privacy abusing tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity.

Full article: http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/

ETA: The bulk of the text in my reply was lifted from a reddit comment. I tried to format my comment to reflect that it's a "quote", alas I've failed. Hence this.

Also, I don't have a card in this game. I understand anonymity and privacy - I dislike intentional deception.

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?).

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Read for the exact timeline

Google search peaked in 2014 - that's when it'd let you do "that movie where [horribly vague summary of an incidental scene]" and get you the answer.

But the complete dropoff started in 2019, when they started letting the ad team remove anti-spam features to game their numbers.

I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are

Interesting, as the incredibly poor results are why I am still not using DDG. It's like a worse Bing, and Bing is already terrible.

You are btw correct that Google results have gotten worse. There were studies run that confirmed this. The very same studies found that Bing (and by extension ~all third-party engines) have also gotten worse, and faster so than Google. In other words, search as a whole has gone to shit, which anecdotally matches up with my repeated attempts to swap to DDG every 6-12 months that just result in learning to add !g to every single search, so I might as well skip doing that.

Funny fact: google's newest feature is also its best, but it's kinda hidden and might not be available everywhere - it's "web search", which cuts out all the awful bullshit

Google is great if you want to buy things. It's absolutely shit for information gathering.

It started when Search Engine Optimisation became a thing, so it's been a while. But it really went downhill a few years ago.

I’ve found Google alternatives great for things that are… filtered (copyright etc), but honestly no matter what search engine I use, I swear none just give you the results for your query anymore. I’ve still been finding the Bing-based ones horrible quality for relevancy and defaulting to Google.

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.

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.

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..

Use this workaround https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/get-google-search-results-without-ai-ads-or-anything-but-links/

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.

Google has been this bad since their initial IPO, when they signalled their intent to do this, and should have been stopped to protect the most useful public utility ever invented. Since that day they've been a pimp; the decision to become a pimp led to this.

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.

I don't know, been on Kagi for a year so forgot Google.

^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.

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.

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

The last few months have especially been bad.

I love when I search for a movie: New Life (2024) it'll give me IMDB results. I hate IMDB so I change my search to: New Life (2024) TMDB Google will give me the TMDB result as the first result and IMDB as the second result but it also has the did you mean "New Life (2024) IMDB" as an alternative search option. Makes me wonder if Amazon (which owns IMDB) is paying Google to push IMDB. Makes me feel like Google is trying to gaslight me.

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).

It might be my localization, but it doesn't seem that bad to me, and I generally use duckduckgo. But forced localization is enough.

I don't see much AI stuff on Google yet but most searches there now give me only video results for some reason, with no way to opt out of them and get text results. It DDG fails me I just give up now.

I use !g if I'm searching for local stores around me but that's pretty much all google search can do well. Oh and images but ddg images are good in most cases.

A couple years ago I began getting frustrated. Last year I started to first go to Bing, google as failsafe. Now I gave up on everything so might as well go with Ecosia. When I NEED something, I'll go with bing/bing's chatGPT.

Startpage (has Google search results) or Google with private browsing haven't given me the new AI suggestions so far

Always.

I think SearXNG is best.

I use 4get.ca

It's only been about a year really, but the Enshittification was logarithmic and got twice as bad every day

I went to StartPage personally.

I did 2 searches yesterday that gave me crap on Google and then I tried Bing and it gave me what I was looking for on the first page.

I use Swiss Cow and it works fine https://swisscows.com

Haven't used it a lot but recently I tried https://searxng.devol.it/

You have infinitely other options. search.brave.com, yandex, bing. And probably a lot of cool ones I don't know about.

All of them search more accurately your directly requested phrase instead of a blurry interpretation of your sentiment.

Startpage.com is a privacy wrapper for google search results. I use it as a backup to DDG.

since it becomes a monopoly

I think since around 2016? Google changed their algos to prioritize mainstream media. This is actually a way to censor since MSM is all controlled by the CIA. Jacobin and NY post have the exact same opinions about countries the CIA and state department don't like.

Use brave search so much better than google