I’m finding the results are not helpful as they used to be and sometimes way past the topic I’m searching. This is very prevalent when I’m searching for pirate sites. I’m falling back to Searxng whenever this occurs.
Has anyone noticed it too? Has DDG upped their moderation?
DuckDuckGo is just a bing proxy. I think Microsoft is working on optimizing it for their copilot thing.
Huh? Doesn’t DDG uses the os default webview?
The DuckDuckGo search engine gets it’s results from the Bing search engine
Bing powers so much of the alternative (meta)sphere
duck duck go is showes Bing results. maybe Microsoft is doing somthing.
In general, I noticed that a significant degradation of search engines began to occur after the appearance of chatGPT, perhaps this is somehow related. Before that, degradation was slower. Maybe in Google for example they were a little afraid that ChatGPT would learn from their search engines and replace them…
Well i dont search anythibg anymore i just have an ai that searches with searxng then answers based on results from that.
EDIT: Why downvote? Is the ai hate boner that bad?
How do you do that?
Found some python code that can act as a openai api proxy. Wrote an ai agent with langchain search tools persistent memory image generators sandboxed code execution environment calculator etc. Use an uncensored llm via openrouters, openai api for vector embedding, locality hosted stable diffusion. Locally hosted searxng. Then i can use any openai api compatable frontend and just point it at my proxy and have an advanced agent in almost any environment.
Havnt published it yet was thinking i could give it an autogpt or baby agi backend but havnt had any success with that yet.
I also noticed redoing a search sometimes yields different results despite using the exact same keywords.
I had the same and just realised that the order of the results got rearranged.
Maybe it’s a fairness strategy? Rather than show everyone the same list so that only the top 3 get all the clicks, they rotate them to spread the traffic.
I’d say their search results have been in decline for some time now, though quality has taken a particularly big hit the past year or so. I’d switch to someone else, but I haven’t found a decent alternative yet. As poor as DDG’s results are, they are still a few rungs above the rubbish Google spits out.
Use Searxng. I always wanted to branch out of DDG and now this is push I needed.
I’ve always used SearXNG and I love it. The only issue that every once in a while an instance stops working and you have to switch, I imagine this isn’t an issue if you self host though
TIL DDG is bing and it’s like being diagnosed with cancer.
Correct; there are many such cases, this map shows a bundle of bing proxies
DDG’s results have always been bad in my experience. Unless I’m searching for the most basic, general stuff, more often than not I find more irrelevant results than relevant ones (if I find any relevant ones at all.)
Not to say that Google is much better. I’ve noticed a steady decline in relevance over the past 15 years.
These days if I want an actual answer to something, I still have to add site:reddit.com to my queries. That or ask an AI and hope it’s not hallucinating some bullshit. It may be full of shit, but at least AI understands what I’m looking for.
I also noticed a change. From one day to the next I suddenly got lots of reddit links in the top results
Yes, DDG results have seen a major drop in quality in the past 4-6 months. It’s been my primary search engine for several years now but I don’t know if my loyalty can withstand such a drastic decline. Bing results must have taken a nosedive as well, but I don’t use Bing so I can’t compare.
In my experience, Google has been to me a better tool to find pirate sites but I got poor results about programming topics there, otherwise, with DuckDuckGo I got excellent results for programming topics but poorly results for pirate sites.
Use searx next time instead of Google.
Google used to have a Linux tab :(
websearch enshittification hits me extra hard because I was always bad at searching. please keep me in your thoughts.
I’ve always had a hard time switching from Google to any other search engine because the gap on quality. But since last year, Google’s results are getting worse and worse but on the other hand I have found DDG to be quite satisfying. So maybe their results have changed, but for me it was for the better.
Indeed, I rarely add !g bang these days, almost never. But I do hate the censorship on DDG, you can rarely find relevant results if you search for anything Russian, or torrents or similar.
russian torrents
As a non-Russian I use Yandex for torrents because there’s nothing better among general use search engines. Also try btdigg if you haven’t.
Interesting. If you don’t mind sharing, what’s with the Russian search stuff? Is there anything good that’s Russian Westerners might be missing out on?
Yep, use to recommend it but it’s just got generic even when filters are set to off, also the ai shit is annoying tho I respect them for not shoving it down my throat. I guess I’ll just wait for ladybug search engine to drop. PS: if anyone’s looking to compile I’ll save you the trouble cause for now it’s only a webview in an app. You could go to DDG or google to search but it’s not a nice experience
Ladybird looks cool. It’s the first ever newsletter I have ever knowingly signed up for.
Too bad it’s expected for 2026
feels censored to me. i wouldn’t be surprised if u had poor results for torrenting websites.
It is. There are sites that I know the url of that dont show up in results.
One site I’ve seen with this behaviour is smspool.net. No matter what you search on DDG, it won’t come up.
