As a general purpose search engine yeah it's just as good. Google has some nice extra features which aren't too important (for example if you search UFC it shows full fight card info and results on the search page).

Where it falls behind is for more "power user " type work. I only use Google at work as it makes finding very specific results with keywords and date ranges on certain sites etc much easier.

Nowadays I use Qwant though to boycott us. It's much slower but still does the job for day to day use.

It has been for several years now. I rarely use Google now, and when I do, I'm using it out of DuckDuckGo (!g)

ive been using it consistently for the past few years. it works well for me, but sometimes ill go to other engines just to see what they come up with, or when results are lacking. sometimes they are better, sometimes they are worse.

meaning ddg is probably good enough nowadays, at least for me.

I'd say the same. Google dorks work much better than DDG's filters for site-specific stuff, and generally for things like "search term" but for general searches DDG seems pretty similar.

The only things I've also had worse performance from DDG on compared to Google (in very minimal ways) has been:

• Highly specific searches (e.g. searching for a diagram of the dimensions of common connector types, DDG shows side-by-sides of connectors, Google does that but also with more diagrams that have dimensions in them)
• Context but not keyword based searches (e.g. "thing that has x y and z characteristics" returns more relevant results in Google than DDG, very marginally)

And of course, there's always the !s bang to run a search through Startpage (which uses Google) if I'm not getting enough detail.

You seriously can't type whatever dae means?

Google just got worse.

I found Qwant to be a bit better, but yeah. Google got so much worse over last few years

I really agree Google just took themself out of the market. I wouldn't be surprised if they dropped their "search" product completely, the way they've dropped a lot of other good products along the way.

yeah honestly I've been using ddg for a very long time and while a few years ago I had to frequently !g because search sucked now google got so enshittified many times ddg feels better

Eyeing the replies, does not one other person here get results constantly flooded with content farms? They've gotten significantly worse

But then, I don't use Google so maybe this is still better than Google Search?

It started maybe three years ago, around the same time as LLMs became usable for this, but I'm pretty sure >50% are human-written still. Probably the LLM generates the structure (saves any time they'd have to spend coming up with plausible-sounding texts) and someone from a low-income country is contracted to make it look more legit

Of course, queries for topics that have a Wikipedia page get Wikipedia first, recipes get tons of big-name recipe sites, products get stores. But when there's no obvious market around a topic, 3~4 out of 5 results are content farms pretending to have useful information to show unwary visitors ads

(As an alternative, I still have to try Kagi properly. It seemed on par with DDG when I did a few searches last year, but then their payment processor refused me trying to load my account, support was unhelpful, and I've gotten sidetracked since)

I really tried, I set duckduckgo as the default for my second browser (I use it a lot) to slowly get used to it, but every time results are so bad I get mad and switch to Google especially for images

Wow, it has been some time since I used duck duck go. On my phone I have bing for searches as it is convenient with chatGPT integration (which tbh I only use when coding, for which I have copilot now baked into VScode). On my laptop and work station I use Arc. Its sexy af and really makes a man wonder about himself. I will have to revisit DDG. I do remember enjoying it though only for enhanced privacy. Feature wise it just seemed exactly what chrome was offering

I can turn off the horseshit firehose that we call AI, making it far better than google

I switched to it a couple of years ago, with the expectation that I had to resort to google in more complex search instances. But very soon I found out that ddg did the job, and my "alternative" google searches did not turn up anything better, quite the contrary in fact, and I haven't been back since.