Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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DuckDuckGo CEO apparently is just another CEO. I've been an early adopter that's been using their search engine long before there were apps or a browser.
What's stopping people from using DDG isn't switching to DDG, it's getting absolutely dogshit results 90% of time. As an advanced user I know I can prefix my search with "!g phrase" to use Google instead of DDG. The sad fact is that despite the ad-ridden result page and tracking, Google is still lightyears ahead in providing relevant, and especially timely results for a user that is both tech-savvy and critical.
They need to improve their product, users will follow a good adfree search engine, that's a given. Only a fraction of users will put up with degraded results in order to search without tracking.
I sincerely hope they will get their tech up to par. And that their browser on mobile reaches feature parity soon. (as a Z Fold user, DDG browser doesn't have tabs. Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox does).
The new kid on the block needs humility and good tech, not shittalk. Fuck that CEO,. he's undermining something very promising and important.
I've never had a problem with DDGs search results that simply rephrasing my query didn't solve. What are you all searching for that Google's results are "light-years ahead" of DuckDuckGo's? (Honest question)
In my recent experience Google still delivers better results for tech troubleshooting queries. "linux drivers for acer e15 card reader" at least points me to some semi-relevant pages on Google that could lead to a solution or more ideas where to look while ddg throws a lot of generic stuff that is only faintly related.
I've switched to DDG almost a year ago, and I never had issues with my search results. Quite the contrary, every time I tried using !g because I simply wasn't finding an answer, the Google was ad-ridden bullshit full of promoted pages without relevance to what I was looking for.
I guess I'm just used to DDG quality of results, but I never felt like it's as bad as you say.
That depends very heavily on what your searching for.
If you're a programmer or similar, like the poster you're replying to appears to be, then you absolutely will find DDG crap compared to Google.
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but if I have a tech question, I usually skip it and go straight to Google.
I made the switch a week ago. For two days at work, I always used Google, DDG and ecosia(uses bing) at the same time to compare the results. They are the same most of the time for the first 10 to 20 results. There's sometimes a blogpost that one engine shows that the other doesn't, but that post never made a difference.
When DDG does not get me helpful results, I can still ask Google to help out.