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?

  • toddestan@lemm.ee
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    12 days ago

    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.

      • LydiaChlamydia@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        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

  • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
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    13 days ago

    DuckDuckGo is just a bing proxy. I think Microsoft is working on optimizing it for their copilot thing.

  • wrekone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    12 days ago

    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.

  • JustVik@lemmy.ml
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    12 days ago

    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…

    • zerozaku@lemmy.worldOP
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      12 days ago

      I’m seeing way more ads at the top(at the top 5 of the search) related to the keyword I’m typing. For eg, if I am searching for a movie pirate website I would get ad results at the top which are paid like Netflix, Amazon Prime etc and no results related to the pirate site I’m searching. This is not how it used to be. I used to find those sites at the top 3 resuls. It was convenient.

      Yes duck assist is great and I like Duck ai as well.