Google kind of went downhill

I use it for almost everything. I only resort to Google if I can't find what I'm looking for, which is rare and typically it's something obscure. Google has also steadily made their service worse over the years. I don't feel like I am missing much.

I’ve been using DDG exclusively for something like 8 years. It works great for regular text search and I use bing for image searches. I really don’t understand the reluctance of people to switch to it. To me, Google has been borderline unusable garbage for a long time.

I use Kagi, I really like how it's AI answer gives sources for statements.

Not really. If you focus purely on just searching, yeah DDG is decent. But, I find its maps inferior and trying to find answers to some questions can get tedious. DDG I guess is just for people who want guilt-free searching.

I find it's actually better at this point because it just gives results without AI summaries and ads, also I find it's just straight up better at actually finding what you're looking for

I just realized the other day that I haven't typed !g in months.

Google is mostly adverts. Wouldn’t take much to be better than that.

So far its still less bloated

DuckDuckGo AKA Bing is complete dog doo. When you are looking for news it only tries to shove in the Microsoft MSN news page. The algorithm manipulation in favor of Western MSM bias is even heavier than Google. When you search certain terms it refuses to show articles containing those exact terms.

My thought always was that DDG was good to set as my default, and if I'm not happy with the results then it's not a big deal to use Google once in awhile.

i switched from DDG to ecosia because of Lemmy and i gotta say it's even better

"just as good"? No, I feel it is (and has been for years) vastly superior but I mostly use it to find documentation or Stack Overflow answers so consistent UI and concise summaries are high priority to me. Take that as you will

I don't think anybody can dethrone Google Maps yet but that's another story

No. DDG still puts less priority in small blogs over Reddit posts. All bigger search engines put way too much stock & rank in corpo social media.

DDG does the job. Hopefully, I won't have to switch engines soon.

isn't it just a bing wrapper?

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

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

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.

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.

I love DDG AI

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