this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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I’d prefer something more secure but all of them just suck. I use DDG but more than half the time I end up needing to use !g to get the google results because DDG just isn’t that good.
I really wonder how people making such claims use it. I'm a dev and have to search daily and constantly and hardly ever don't I find something and when I don't, the Google bang doesn't help either.
But maybe DDG just works well for technical stuff.?
If I’m searching for something very specific, I’m generally searching a site I already know will have the answer. So if I’m looking for how to do something with code or devops tools, I to limit my search to stackoverflow or another forum first, or the respective sites for their documentation.
For all of that, DDG works perfectly. And that’s what I use it for most of the time. I will use it to search within sites a ton. Like if I want to get information about a person, event, whatever, I’ll search Wikipedia first and dive through the article and sources there.
Where it tends to fail, and it could be my own fault, is just general searches where I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for. Google is better at interpreting what I’m searching for and returning relevant results. DDG is like “here’s your results retard, search better next time”.
DDG is also a for profit venture and uses privacy more as a marketing ploy. They’ve been caught allowing Microsoft trackers.
That was their browser though and you shouldn't use a Chromium based browser anyway if you value privacy (and the future of the web for that matter).
Yeah, you have to be wary of whatever online service you use. I don't really trust DDG but I trust the alternatives less.
Ive been using bing and bing copilot more and more for general stuff these last few months. Google needs to up their game. Other than that I use ddg as my first point of call
DDG largely uses the Bing API anyway so there’s no reason to use Bing itself over DDG. Bing is as bad or worse than Google for privacy.
I’m going to keep using DDG just out of principle and hope that their own crawler continues to get up to speed. They’ve definitely gotten better over the years but still leave a lot to be desired for search.