• lud@lemm.ee
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    1 year 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
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      1 year 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
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        1 year 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
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          1 year 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
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            1 year ago

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

      • ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world
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        1 year 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
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          1 year 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.

      • aodhsishaj@lemmy.world
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        1 year 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.

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year 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 :(

          • czech@low.faux.moe
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            1 year ago

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

            • m_randall@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year 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
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                1 year 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
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      1 year 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
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        11 months ago

        Works perfectly fine for trouble shooting complicated IT problems.

    • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
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      1 year 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.