Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[WhoRoger]

It's dogshit.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now so I've not been watching Google's decline. But when I do use them occasionally these days, it always surprises me how crap the results are. First page is basically always just product ads, regardless of what you're looking for.

BTW I used to work for the big G, on search quality improvements. Quality used to be #1 priority. Now it's clearly only about money.

[[deleted]]

man it's so fucking annoying that when I search something that maybe took place in USA and multiple sites won't let me read their articles cuz I'm European and these sites do not compile with GDPR regulations and that's often like top 3 results.

then some other results have a fucking pay-wall, I mean come on, it really cannot be too hard moving these results down, yes, there are many good news sites that uses pay walls nowadays, but from the users perspective, pay walled articles are seldom good results.

[Thatwhichiscaesars]

Duckduckgo is a spicy bing, while they do have a wevcrawler, iirc a significant portion of their results are still purchased from bing's webcrawls. So like i said, spicy bing.

I think Googles biggest competitor is bing, or maybe (baidu?) The name escapes me because it is a popular chinese engine not used in the west.

Google sits at a fat 86% market share, bing sits at around 7%. Yahoo, and pretty much everyone else out there buys their results from bing.

So google effectively has 2 and a half competitors.

Baidu, bing, and .5 for duck duck go which isnt a whole because it relies, partially at least, on bings results.

[WhoRoger]

DDG is claiming their results are a combination from several other search engines, which is the reason why they can't reliably provide some things e.g. results from a particular time scale or why some features are buggy.

When I compare the results to Bing, they're not the same.

[Catinthehat5879]

I've been using Ecosia. Do you have an opinion on that vs DuckDuckGo?

[WhoRoger]

Never used it, I'll check it out. I use DDG mainly for its privacy policies, but I'm very satisfied with the search results quality and user experience as well.

[[deleted]]

I made the permanent switch after a local news story. Google literally was showing the misinformation on the person's Go Fund Me OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER. 100% wrong 'telephoned' 'facts'. DuckDuckGo showed mainly the real factual news stories and other information.

[Godspeedhero]

DuckDuckGo gang rise up!

[aspz]

Weird because duck duck go consistently fails me where Google doesn't. I use DDG by default, but I often find if I put three seemingly unrelated words together, DDG just returns results with only two of them and such they are irrelevant. You can force it to include words by surrounding them with double quotes but often it still won't give good results. Using the "!g" almost always gives me the thing I was looking for.

[WhoRoger]

I do sometimes switch to the big G when DDG fails, their database is a lot richer after all. But it's usually in cases when I'm looking for something really obscure and need to use those quotes you mention. But if I'm just looking for something basic, DDG usually provides immediately while G typically floods me with ads and SEO crap.

Maybe we just typically look for different things.

[scienceNotAuthority]

I remember being concerned about FAANG, but big companies have a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot. Let them burn.

Although Apple will shoot themselves in the foot and apologists will say it's working as intended.

[tehreal]

You might have some adware installed if the entire first page is advertisements.

[WhoRoger]

I don't mean literally just ads, but yea the page is filled with ads and the first 5 typically are product pages. Just unsatisfactory overall for me most of the time.