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submitted 11 months ago by whfsdude@dmv.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[-] lud@lemm.ee 27 points 11 months ago

It also does that with other unrecognised user agents.

Personally I don't understand why someone would still use Google when duckduckgo has more features and is just as good for searching and in the very rare case it isn't you can easily switch back temporarily by just adding the prefix "!g" to your query.

[-] ruckblack@sh.itjust.works 27 points 11 months ago

I tried duckduckgo for a while and kept coming back to Google for "real" searches at work. It's not as good for searching in my experience. Yet.

[-] masquenox@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago

Duckduckgo has become a little better than it used to be... but google has also become a whole lot worse.

[-] Klear@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I haven't quite found a replacement that is better than google, but the way the trajectories are, it's only a matter of time.

[-] masquenox@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

If you're looking for research papers, duckduckgo (and yandex) is your friend - google is perfectly unusable for that these days.

[-] pohart@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

an

This is the truth. I switched back when I got a new pc at work, and google was way worse.

[-] ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

The vast majority of times I go back to Google to do a search I find it also returns useless results. I'm not convinced it's any better than duckduckgo. I think it used to be, but not anymore.

[-] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

I had the same experience. I used switch between DDG and Google when DDG gave results I didn't want. During the pandemic, I remember DDG giving lots of false positives and odd, non-standard web page hits. Like, if I was searching for current COVID advice, it would give me hits from the health department in Bumfuck, Nebraska instead of, say, CDC (and I don't live in Bumfuck, Nebraska). It has really improved since then and now I can use DDG pretty much exclusively. Not having to scroll past a page of Google ads to find my search results is quite glorious.

[-] skeezix@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

The 6 residents of bumfuck Nebraska would like a word with you after their Trump circlejerk.

[-] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

And I would be honored to speak with them!

[-] agileharddisk@lemmy.today 3 points 11 months ago

I think it depends on wether google is eating the cookies or not

[-] aodhsishaj@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

What's your field?

I'm in a DevOps/Cloud Engineer role and DDG works better for me than Google. No ads and somehow fewer of the gpt generated fake help articles.

[-] ruckblack@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 months ago

Same vein, devops/data engineering. Maybe I'll give it another shot, I'd like to get off Google.

[-] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 6 points 11 months ago

Big same. I’ll even bang out to Startpage to try to avoid directly using Google (!sp vs. !g), but that’s not as good either.

I bow to my search overlord Google. Until I try Grasp, Kagi, and SearXNG, and hopefully one of those will satisfy (in particular SearXNG).

Until then DDG remains my default, and I’ll !g half the time :(

[-] jamyang@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Did you use Kagi? How was it?

[-] czech@low.faux.moe 4 points 11 months ago

Been using Kagi for a few months. Now that the unlimited tier is $10 it's a no brainer, for me.

[-] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago

One of the three on my to-try list, still.

[-] m_randall@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

I tried it a few months ago and bought it before the trial was over. Took some time to build trust but it’s still on par with google if not better.

(My account probably looks like a shill for them but I swear I’m just a happy user)

[-] jmp242@sopuli.xyz 1 points 11 months ago

I also really like Kagi, and their bundle for Ultimate users of the various text AI tools is also very helpful for work.

[-] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

I really want to ditch Google, but DuckDuckGo aint there my brother.

It may work for some simpler/lazy searches, but for real stuff, nah.

The "good" thing is that Google search is going the way of Amazon, so with Google shooting themselves in the foot and DDG catching up a bit, maybe soon they'll level

[-] lud@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

Works perfectly fine for trouble shooting complicated IT problems.

[-] slumberlust@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Isn't ducksuckgo just paying for google search with a privacy wrapper/obfuscation layer on top?

[-] yacht_boy@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Yes, except for it's Bing search not Google

[-] lud@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

I think they also use Yahoo and their own scrapers too.

Not that it matters of course.

[-] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

ddg always drops one of at least two troublesome terms. Which is infuriating.

Might have to do with my settings, in which case it is a bug.

Bangs are gold (which is why ddg is my default) but i still sometimes miss exclusions.

this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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