this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
292 points (95.3% liked)

Asklemmy

46520 readers
1077 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy πŸ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Not because DDG got better, but just because google got worse.

google is still better for site-specific searches, and google scholar still has minimal AI slop

(page 3) 35 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

100%. I have not used google in about roughly 15 years. DDG has been my daily driver since 2010

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've had to use !g way too much lately, so no.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Bangs, used to move the search to another site, in this case google

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Better usually in my experience. Google is mostly SEO-sludge anyway. Though sometimes when you need something very specific Google is better but that gap has been pretty much closed during 7+ years I’ve used DDG.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I use Startpage and it feels like I always get the results I want even when I don't use perfect prompts. Just recently I got a three month free trial for Kagi and the results were better than google in my opinion, or at least less cluttered with "possibly related things" that are just ads in the end.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I switched to exclusively Kagi on my phone and it's been a pretty pleasant experience. Not perfect, but fairly serviceable. You're right, it's way less cluttered. Going back to Google can sometimes be very jarring.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not as good as google was when I was first allowed to use the internet 15+ years ago, but much better than today's google. Just so much more peace of mind to know that profit isn't what governs my search results.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It still kinda does, since it's Bing under the hood.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

kagi still owns both of them. but there's also startpage and leta which are google wrappers if you don't want to use Google directly

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Just dont use ChatGPT but one of the other models. I find LLama to work fine.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wha... Why? Why gpt the only baddy?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Well afaik they host their open source models them selves / with a cloud service they have control over so no data going to big bad tech

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah, I trust DuckDuckGo. And I like they anonymize my AI queries. I feel like it’s the next best thing to running it locally.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Does their 'anonymizing queries' feat mean anything if they don't disclose how it works or what that even means literally?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

At least with the open source models the data is not sent to the big bad tech cooperations afaik

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

"Trust me bro"

load more comments
view more: β€Ή prev next β€Ί