Google's been getting worse, but it's not like Bing has been getting better. Maybe it's just the way I search for things, but I can never get Bing to work.
I use DDG, which works for about 90% of my searches, but when it doesn't work, I go back to Google, often in a private window. I do agree that Google is still just, I dunno, better?
When I used DDG, the !g bang to search on Google became wired in my brain to "get me better results, please", so much that I sometimes tried using it in Google search too.
DDG gets its results from other search engines. Bing is one of them.
There was also a big thing about DDG allegedly selling user data to Microsoft, which the living brain donors of 4chan probably interpreted as DDG being a different front-end to Bing.
It wasn't exactly selling, but it also wasn't alleged. They made an exception for Microsoft's tracking scripts in their tracking script blocking settings on their phone apps and extensions in exchange for utilizing bing as a backend. Here is the blog post where they walked it back after backlash.
I have heard about them selling search data to bing. While concerning, I don't think that's quite the same thing. I get how 4Chan could blow that out of proportion.
My understanding is that they outsource the search part to bing's search back-end. Saying DDG is just Bing is like saying two butchers are the same because they get their meat from the same supplier.
Some people get paid good money for outsourcing their back end. Some also get paid for outsourcing other peoples' back ends, but that is generally frowned upon.
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
There are really only two usable search engines actually indexing the entire Internet: Google and Bing. Yandex also does but I've never seen it recommended for anything other than Russian language content (the company itself seems to be falling down a mineshaft at the moment). Baidu also does some although every Chinese exchange student I talked to about it (admittedly not many) advised only using it when Google is blocked. Every other engine is just wrapping Google or Bing (yes that includes Yahoo and DDG)
This is the kind of ugly truth of the search engine business. It's a duopoly at least in part because the indicies are expensive to scrape, build, and run. You need to continuously run a large number of servers loading web pages and often running scripts. You need to be large enough to negotiate with content providers not to block you. Keep in mind paying them may bankrupt you as your margins will be thin. Google has a huge advantage here they own a good chunk of the online advertising industry and can afford to throw money around in a way a search only company wouldn't be able to (this is why the European and Canadian link tax schemes ironically cement the existing monopolies). You need to continuously run large linear aglebra transforms on the results (PageRank is expensive). You need to store all your indicies on large expensive servers with a lot of memory as hitting disk may take too long. Results need to be fast and you will make next to nothing on each search.
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.[69][7][70][71][72] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.[71][73] During a Bing API outage in 2024, DuckDuckGo stopped showing results, indicating that Bing provided a substantial portion of DuckDuckGo's results.[74][75]
Nobody else has mentioned this but there have been several times that Bing censored something and it propagated to DDG, most notably when Microsoft censored Tank Man (intended for China, probably) but then Tank Man also was censored on DDG.
Partly because of these incidents, I could never consider DDG reliable.
I fucking hate ai but ddg's ai summary is the one place I don't mind it. It doesn't open unless I click it, and I only click it when I don't actually give a shit about the correctness of something. It's great for throwaway factoids that you're curious about in the moment but won't remember or care about an hour later lol. Often saves me from wasting time going down a wikipedia rabbithole when I need to be doing something else
It's great for throwaway factoids that you're curious about in the moment but won't remember or care about an hour later
Not even the greatest Sci-Fi writers of, this, and all future times could ever hope to conceive an idea of an intelligence, not of human origin, that would be able to answer such riveting questions as "what's the name of that guy in that movie?". Cutie, eat your positronic heart out.
lite.duckduckgo.com is my default search engine. I have other more specific searches for stuff like Wikipedia and sepiasearch, and I use duckduckgo regular for shopping.
Thats honestly why I use Qwant. They're from europe (France) and even tho they still rely on Bing they are working with Ecosia to build their own independent european search index
Ecosia does still rely on Bing, and will for a while. But they are building their own search index and started rolling it out for more and more search queries and languages last year.
On DuckDuckGo there's this weird phenomena where if my query includes words that are even slightly related to porn themes all my results will be porn. Does this happen on Bing as well?
for real though if you ever want to watch a movie for free online it is by far the best for finding copywrited material (due to not filtering it out and letting you search for videos > 20 mins in length)
At least as good as google. The belief that google is a better search engine is antiquated, based on a situation that no longer exists. Google has long since fallen to ad algorithms and bloat.
People have this weird fetish for "Microsoft Bad". If it comes from Microsoft, it's bad by default. Reality doesn't matter.
The fact that Edge is just objectively a better browser than Chrome is irrelevant, because "Microsoft Bad".
The fact that Bing now provides just as good, if not better, results as Google, because Google enshittified its own product is irrelevant, because "Microsoft Bad".
The fact that Copilot runs on the exact same models as ChatGPT and gives practically identical results is irrelevant because "Microsoft Bad".
See? This is exactly the childish shit I'm talking about. "Microsoft bad" is all you need to get upvotes, but if you state some cut and dry facts that are not attacking Microsoft, you get downvoted.
microsoft is bad. google is too. and so is openai.
edge used to be internet explorer, which used to be known as the worst browser ever. and if you care at all about privacy, the chrome-based microsoft browser isn't a good idea.
bing used to be really bad.
copilot gets shoved down every window user's throats.
edge used to be internet explorer, which used to be known as the worst browser ever
And Linux used to not have a GUI. Are you going to complain that Linux is too difficult to use because it used to be command-line based? What even is this point?
and if you care at all about privacy, the chrome-based microsoft browser isn’t a good idea.
When comparing Chromium-based browsers you don't expect much privacy at all. But even comparing Chromium-based browsers people will still go "ughh, Chrome is better because Microsoft Bad", which is just a stupid thing to say considering Edge has everything that Chrome has and then a bunch of features on top of that. Including better resource utilisation.
bing used to be really bad.
See first paragraph.
copilot gets shoved down every window user’s throats.
And Linux used to not have a GUI. Are you going to complain that Linux is too difficult to use because it used to be command-line based? What even is this point?
When do you think Linux didn't have a GUI? CDE was released in 1993, and let's be honest: nobody used Linux before 1993.
edge used to be internet explorer, which used to be known as the worst browser ever
what i meant by that is: people used to hate internet explorer because it was the worst. even though it changed completely, people still hate it because of it's history.
And Linux used to not have a GUI. Are you going to complain that Linux is too difficult to use because it used to be command-line based? What even is this point?
yes, indeed. i'm not sure about GUI since that's so long ago and windows used to be MSDOS, but similarly to edge, people think linux is hard because of it's history of requiring the terminal for basic functions.
When comparing Chromium-based browsers you don't expect much privacy at all. But even comparing Chromium-based browsers people will still go "ughh, Chrome is better because Microsoft Bad", which is just a stupid thing to say considering Edge has everything that Chrome has and then a bunch of features on top of that. Including better resource utilisation.
honestly, idk much about edge, though i've also never seen anyone complain about edge simply because of "microsoft bad".
bing used to be really bad.
See first paragraph.
you too, i guess
copilot gets shoved down every window user’s throats.
What's the point you're trying to make here?
people don't want stuff shoved down their throats without consent, which seems to be what microsoft is really good at doing. actually, now that i think about it, that's the same issue with edge, since whenever you uninstall it (which has to be done through unconventional means), it'll just reappear the next time the system updates.
what i meant by that is: people used to hate internet explorer because it was the worst. even though it changed completely, people still hate it because of it’s history.
That's precisely my point though. People are not talking about the product, they're talking about the company/history. Not only was the original Edge very much "not Internet Explorer", but nowadays Edge is running on Chromium, making the whole comparison to IE even stupider. But people still do, because "Microsoft Bad".
people think linux is hard because of it’s history of requiring the terminal for basic functions.
People think Linux is hard because it still requires terminal for basic functions. Source: a guy who moved to Linux full-time over a year ago.
people don’t want stuff shoved down their throats without consent, which seems to be what microsoft is really good at doing
I get that, but what's the relation of that to what I was talking about? I'm talking about comparing the capabilities of various LLMs where people will swear on their mothers that Copilot is the worst shite they ever saw, not realising that it's essentially the same as ChatGPT.
Source: ran LLM testing and implementation in two different companies.
that’s the same issue with edge, since whenever you uninstall it (which has to be done through unconventional means), it’ll just reappear the next time the system updates.
That's precisely my point though. People are not talking about the product, they're talking about the company/history. Not only was the original Edge very much "not Internet Explorer", but nowadays Edge is running on Chromium, making the whole comparison to IE even stupider. But people still do, because "Microsoft Bad".
yeah. idk where you keep seeing this "microsoft bad" thing. people don't like it because of its history. people still mostly use chrome because they learned it was faster than firefox, and now that they're equal in speed, people still think of firefox as slower. not wanting a company's product doesn't have to mean they hate the company.
People think Linux is hard because it still requires terminal for basic functions. Source: a guy who moved to Linux full-time over a year ago.
if you don't use one of the distros that come preinstalled with a bunch of ui apps that do stuff that used to require a terminal, sure.
I get that, but what's the relation of that to what I was talking about? I'm talking about comparing the capabilities of various LLMs where people will swear on their mothers that Copilot is the worst shite they ever saw, not realising that it's essentially the same as ChatGPT.
if you get orange juice shoved down your throat, you probably won't like it, even if you generally like orange juice.
Yeah, that's not the case for years now.
oh well, it is true that i haven't used windows for years now.
yeah. idk where you keep seeing this “microsoft bad” thing
*points at this thread*
I also gave you a bunch of examples already. Just visit r/Windows or r/Windows11 and you'll get an eye full.
if you don’t use one of the distros that come preinstalled with a bunch of ui apps that do stuff that used to require a terminal, sure.
That's just completely wrong. You can't set a secondary drive to auto-mount on boot without CLI, fixing a failing BT device connection requires CLI, if an AppImage fails to launch due to AppArmor, you need the CLI to fix it, can't prevent the OS from switching a BT headset to the "hands free" mode without CLI, etc., etc., etc.
EDIT: some distros maybe allow changing this stuff through the GUI - I went through three, all with KDE, so maybe that's why I needed CLI, but that's also kind of the point - unless you really spend time to learn about the particular distribution, you never know what you're going to get. Which, to the new users who will not want to spend time to doctorise themselves on the subject, means that it's an added difficulty layer.
if you get orange juice shoved down your throat, you probably won’t like it, even if you generally like orange juice.
If you're talking about the nutritional value of different juices, you wouldn't say "orange juice is shit, has zero nutritional value" just because you don't lie it, would you?
They could use Google as far as I'm concerned. From a privacy perspective if 1 million people are proxied through DDG, Google won't be able to collect any personal data as long as DDG can be trusted with their security. And as far as I'm concerned they can be.
I'm aware. To be clear, I use DuckDuckGo. But I think it's disingenuous to recommend it to people who are looking for a browser without ai without also warning them that you need to type in the special codephrase to remove its ai as well
Google doesnt let you turn it off at all unless you do -ai. Ddg, on the other hand, has a setting for disabling it completely or limiting how and when it shows up
Google's been getting worse, but it's not like Bing has been getting better. Maybe it's just the way I search for things, but I can never get Bing to work.
The problem is you have so many SEO slip makers gaming the algorithm that no one can keep up.
And most of the decent content is gated behind walled gardens now.
I use DDG, which works for about 90% of my searches, but when it doesn't work, I go back to Google, often in a private window. I do agree that Google is still just, I dunno, better?
Just use the !s bang in your ddg search. It forwards your search to startpage, a google proxy. Same results but more protection.
Idk what I'm doing wrong, but any time I can't find something in DDG and turn to Google, I get exact same results.
Exceptions are:
localized search (obviously), however I don't use that in Google either and just do ‘searchterm cityname’ or use the local map service instead.
searching on Reddit: Google has an agreement with Reddit for vacuuming all new content immediately.
looking for a meme image by its description or caption. This definitely works in Google and pretty much doesn't in Bing/DDG.
When I used DDG, the !g bang to search on Google became wired in my brain to "get me better results, please", so much that I sometimes tried using it in Google search too.
Looking over their Wikipedia page, DDG looks like they're reasonably independent.
Why is everyone saying they're just Bing?
DDG gets its results from other search engines. Bing is one of them.
There was also a big thing about DDG allegedly selling user data to Microsoft, which the living brain donors of 4chan probably interpreted as DDG being a different front-end to Bing.
It wasn't exactly selling, but it also wasn't alleged. They made an exception for Microsoft's tracking scripts in their tracking script blocking settings on their phone apps and extensions in exchange for utilizing bing as a backend. Here is the blog post where they walked it back after backlash.
I have heard about them selling search data to bing. While concerning, I don't think that's quite the same thing. I get how 4Chan could blow that out of proportion.
My understanding is that they outsource the search part to bing's search back-end. Saying DDG is just Bing is like saying two butchers are the same because they get their meat from the same supplier.
With all due respect, I don't know enough about butchering but it sounds far less complicated than what we're talking about
Outsourcing back ends is one of the key parts of being a butcher.
Some people get paid good money for outsourcing their back end. Some also get paid for outsourcing other peoples' back ends, but that is generally frowned upon.
When they're frowning are they doing that at a fur coat and gold chain?
I can't find any sources to corroborate this claim. Can you link some sources?
It looks like Bing is just a part of the answer: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources
There are really only two usable search engines actually indexing the entire Internet: Google and Bing. Yandex also does but I've never seen it recommended for anything other than Russian language content (the company itself seems to be falling down a mineshaft at the moment). Baidu also does some although every Chinese exchange student I talked to about it (admittedly not many) advised only using it when Google is blocked. Every other engine is just wrapping Google or Bing (yes that includes Yahoo and DDG)
This is the kind of ugly truth of the search engine business. It's a duopoly at least in part because the indicies are expensive to scrape, build, and run. You need to continuously run a large number of servers loading web pages and often running scripts. You need to be large enough to negotiate with content providers not to block you. Keep in mind paying them may bankrupt you as your margins will be thin. Google has a huge advantage here they own a good chunk of the online advertising industry and can afford to throw money around in a way a search only company wouldn't be able to (this is why the European and Canadian link tax schemes ironically cement the existing monopolies). You need to continuously run large linear aglebra transforms on the results (PageRank is expensive). You need to store all your indicies on large expensive servers with a lot of memory as hitting disk may take too long. Results need to be fast and you will make next to nothing on each search.
Can you link any sources on this?
I think that's my big hesitance to believe it, there just doesn't seem evidence (besides other commenter mentioning an anecdotal tank man reference).
In the wikipedia article:
Nobody else has mentioned this but there have been several times that Bing censored something and it propagated to DDG, most notably when Microsoft censored Tank Man (intended for China, probably) but then Tank Man also was censored on DDG.
Partly because of these incidents, I could never consider DDG reliable.
The whole tank man stuff is fucking stupid
I use DDG just because they have !bangs and it saves me so much time.
!yt searches YouTube !imdb searches IMDb
And so on.
I just have that in my browser. If I type
y search termI get a YouTube Search page for "search term".If bangs are used for positive searching how do I search for things without the name. I thought !youtube filters out YouTube.
-YouTube.com should filter it out. !yt actually takes you to YouTube and then searches the keyword(s).
The mighty minus! Apparently I forgot about that. Ty yt!
you can do this with most other search engines i think by prefixing your search with the domain name or name of the website
no, bangs take you to the website and searches it in there
I just add bang manually for the ones I frequently use to firefox search with the standard OpenSearch format and use Qwant instead
DDG has the ai summary too
Its easy to disable. Also, check https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
I fucking hate ai but ddg's ai summary is the one place I don't mind it. It doesn't open unless I click it, and I only click it when I don't actually give a shit about the correctness of something. It's great for throwaway factoids that you're curious about in the moment but won't remember or care about an hour later lol. Often saves me from wasting time going down a wikipedia rabbithole when I need to be doing something else
Not even the greatest Sci-Fi writers of, this, and all future times could ever hope to conceive an idea of an intelligence, not of human origin, that would be able to answer such riveting questions as "what's the name of that guy in that movie?". Cutie, eat your positronic heart out.
lite.duckduckgo.com is my default search engine. I have other more specific searches for stuff like Wikipedia and sepiasearch, and I use duckduckgo regular for shopping.
yeah idk what theyre talking about
DDG at least has a setting to disable it and I believe a separate URL if you don't wanna use an account or cookies to save the setting
Thats honestly why I use Qwant. They're from europe (France) and even tho they still rely on Bing they are working with Ecosia to build their own independent european search index
So ecosia doesn't rely on google nor bing?
Ecosia does still rely on Bing, and will for a while. But they are building their own search index and started rolling it out for more and more search queries and languages last year.
Bing, the porn search engine of your dreams.
Ah, a fellow Bing Boy
On DuckDuckGo there's this weird phenomena where if my query includes words that are even slightly related to porn themes all my results will be porn. Does this happen on Bing as well?
I don't know, if I'm not looking for porn I don't use bing.
just Bing it bro!
for real though if you ever want to watch a movie for free online it is by far the best for finding copywrited material (due to not filtering it out and letting you search for videos > 20 mins in length)
I use Ecosia. There's just a regular setting to turn the AI thing off. It's like 1 of 5 settings they have in total.
which is also bing..
It's not just bing. It's results from bing, Google and eusp.
And DDG uses Bing and Yandex
No they're building their own open european search index currently with Qwant
ddg has always been bing, but it's always been pointless pointing. They laugh at maga, though, and wonder about sheep.
in bings credit, it gave me the archive links to rock band 4s removed content for uhh... file existance purposes that google outirght scrubs out.
Does Bing not work? Because DDG gets results for me
At least as good as google. The belief that google is a better search engine is antiquated, based on a situation that no longer exists. Google has long since fallen to ad algorithms and bloat.
People have this weird fetish for "Microsoft Bad". If it comes from Microsoft, it's bad by default. Reality doesn't matter.
The fact that Edge is just objectively a better browser than Chrome is irrelevant, because "Microsoft Bad".
The fact that Bing now provides just as good, if not better, results as Google, because Google enshittified its own product is irrelevant, because "Microsoft Bad".
The fact that Copilot runs on the exact same models as ChatGPT and gives practically identical results is irrelevant because "Microsoft Bad".
Etc., etc.
Microsoft is bad though
See? This is exactly the childish shit I'm talking about. "Microsoft bad" is all you need to get upvotes, but if you state some cut and dry facts that are not attacking Microsoft, you get downvoted.
microsoft is bad. google is too. and so is openai.
edge used to be internet explorer, which used to be known as the worst browser ever. and if you care at all about privacy, the chrome-based microsoft browser isn't a good idea.
bing used to be really bad.
copilot gets shoved down every window user's throats.
And Linux used to not have a GUI. Are you going to complain that Linux is too difficult to use because it used to be command-line based? What even is this point?
When comparing Chromium-based browsers you don't expect much privacy at all. But even comparing Chromium-based browsers people will still go "ughh, Chrome is better because Microsoft Bad", which is just a stupid thing to say considering Edge has everything that Chrome has and then a bunch of features on top of that. Including better resource utilisation.
See first paragraph.
What's the point you're trying to make here?
When do you think Linux didn't have a GUI? CDE was released in 1993, and let's be honest: nobody used Linux before 1993.
Let me rephrase: Linux used to be completely reliant on CLI for the most basic things.
what i meant by that is: people used to hate internet explorer because it was the worst. even though it changed completely, people still hate it because of it's history.
yes, indeed. i'm not sure about GUI since that's so long ago and windows used to be MSDOS, but similarly to edge, people think linux is hard because of it's history of requiring the terminal for basic functions.
honestly, idk much about edge, though i've also never seen anyone complain about edge simply because of "microsoft bad".
you too, i guess
people don't want stuff shoved down their throats without consent, which seems to be what microsoft is really good at doing. actually, now that i think about it, that's the same issue with edge, since whenever you uninstall it (which has to be done through unconventional means), it'll just reappear the next time the system updates.
That's precisely my point though. People are not talking about the product, they're talking about the company/history. Not only was the original Edge very much "not Internet Explorer", but nowadays Edge is running on Chromium, making the whole comparison to IE even stupider. But people still do, because "Microsoft Bad".
People think Linux is hard because it still requires terminal for basic functions. Source: a guy who moved to Linux full-time over a year ago.
I get that, but what's the relation of that to what I was talking about? I'm talking about comparing the capabilities of various LLMs where people will swear on their mothers that Copilot is the worst shite they ever saw, not realising that it's essentially the same as ChatGPT.
Source: ran LLM testing and implementation in two different companies.
Yeah, that's not the case for years now.
yeah. idk where you keep seeing this "microsoft bad" thing. people don't like it because of its history. people still mostly use chrome because they learned it was faster than firefox, and now that they're equal in speed, people still think of firefox as slower. not wanting a company's product doesn't have to mean they hate the company.
if you don't use one of the distros that come preinstalled with a bunch of ui apps that do stuff that used to require a terminal, sure.
if you get orange juice shoved down your throat, you probably won't like it, even if you generally like orange juice.
oh well, it is true that i haven't used windows for years now.
*points at this thread*
I also gave you a bunch of examples already. Just visit r/Windows or r/Windows11 and you'll get an eye full.
That's just completely wrong. You can't set a secondary drive to auto-mount on boot without CLI, fixing a failing BT device connection requires CLI, if an AppImage fails to launch due to AppArmor, you need the CLI to fix it, can't prevent the OS from switching a BT headset to the "hands free" mode without CLI, etc., etc., etc.
EDIT: some distros maybe allow changing this stuff through the GUI - I went through three, all with KDE, so maybe that's why I needed CLI, but that's also kind of the point - unless you really spend time to learn about the particular distribution, you never know what you're going to get. Which, to the new users who will not want to spend time to doctorise themselves on the subject, means that it's an added difficulty layer.
If you're talking about the nutritional value of different juices, you wouldn't say "orange juice is shit, has zero nutritional value" just because you don't lie it, would you?
DDG is not bing. using bing's index and being bing are two different things, and by the way, I'd use bing over Google's shitty ass shit every day.
Fuck everything, I'm going back to Ask Jeeves.
Ask Jeeves became https://www.ask.com/ which still works. Not very good for finding results.
I just want altavista back.
I just want altavista back.
I just want altavista back.
They could use Google as far as I'm concerned. From a privacy perspective if 1 million people are proxied through DDG, Google won't be able to collect any personal data as long as DDG can be trusted with their security. And as far as I'm concerned they can be.
startpage does that
DuckDuckGo has ai btw
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
I'm aware. To be clear, I use DuckDuckGo. But I think it's disingenuous to recommend it to people who are looking for a browser without ai without also warning them that you need to type in the special codephrase to remove its ai as well
Google doesnt let you turn it off at all unless you do -ai. Ddg, on the other hand, has a setting for disabling it completely or limiting how and when it shows up
You make a good point
There are other options, qwant, ecosia…
Vague... they're going to gouge their eyes out or they're going to become oedipus and fuck their own mom?
Didnt DDG get in trouble for selling/tracking user data without telling anyone? Or was that Brave Browser? Maybe it was both, I don't remember...
EDIT: Both. DDG made a deal to sell tracker data to Microsoft, and Brave Browser sold user data for AI training.
What do you use?
What's even the point of writing the comment when you don't remember? Just stirring drama for the sake of it isn't helping anyone.
God I love searx
I don't. It never returns relevant results. At least DDG/Bing tries to be accurate.
Searx is a metasearch engine, if you have it aggregate results from ddg/bing I'd imagine you'd get results similar to ddg/bing.
God I love ar
You get the ar, I will get the sex.
Ok fine, point me to where I should be searching?
Metacrawler and AskJeeves
Hotbot
I mostly try to find something on Wikipedia first whenever I can (surprisingly often) and go from there.
https://www.ecosia.org/
They currently use Google and Bing however the ad money goes towards things like planting trees and:
https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/
They are slowly building their own search index
I only use ddg to watch youtube from their video search tab
Bring back Infoseek
Wow, turns out I've fucking Anon's mum all these years? Amazing!