Long ago, when I still thought of Google as a good company that made good decisions for its users, I never had the impression that I'd done an exhaustive web search until I searched on Google. Now, searching Google always gives me the impression that I'm searching a heavily filtered, AI-curated subset of the web. I switched to DDG recently, and so far the results give me that impression that I'm searching 'the whole web' or something like it. I suppose it's inevitable that Google was ruined by becoming so enormous, having to be all things to everybody, especially its shareholders.

I love DDG but the problem is that google is still the best whenever I want to search something that's not in English or that's localized. So I still use google for that.

I use DDG when I want nonlocalized results that aren't as biased

But most times I want information tailored specific to my issues so google is better for me 90% of the time.

Try Yandex if it is available in your language.

How is Yandex any better then Google?

Hmm, I get pretty good DDG search results in Japanese. I assume you're searching in your target language, rather than search terms in English with the name of your desired language tacked on?

To be fair, DDG is actually quite decent in Japanese but when searching in French I find that it's often lacking. I think it's mostly that French is not dissimilar enough from English for the search engine to pick up on it sometimes.

It might also have something to do with more French speakers knowing English than Japanese speakers knowing English.

also recent news. google still way above ddg on minutes old news.

The easiest way to view how wrongly Google has strayed is to search for something like "First Singer Songwriter". Google automates a rich card to say "Charles Trenet 1938" while showing an image of Woody Guthrie..

It's generating its own fake news at this point.

And its ignoring the long history of folk protest song eg "the world turnd upside down" which is a ECW protest song.

Oh and I forgot the medieval Chanson which is ever earlier.

Long long ago, I used to use Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, etc., and then I discovered AltaVista and I felt the similarly. The algorithms and relevance wasn't as good as what Google eventually came up with, but it felt like AltaVista had results that its contemporaries weren't getting.

DDG is starting to feel a bit like AltaVista in that regard.

DDG is mostly just Bing results in case you're unaware.

They use "over 400 sources" for results.

Most of their links come from their own webcrawler, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

TIL webcrawler still exists.

Been a ddg user since the early days, and it's amazing how obvious they make googles user hostile moves year after year. Amp, blackhat seo support because $, non boolean search, and now images.

Honestly, this is why I love the Internet. Because while a company gets more and more focused on profits and power the Internet will just come up with something better... until that thing becomes the thing it hates and the pattern repeats.

A perfect example of this is digg and reddit. Reddit has gone so far downhill the minute someone has a real replacement it's going the way of Slashdot.

Fuck Google, Fuck Facebook, Fuck Microsoft, Fuck oracle, Fuck reddit, and Fuck all the other services that pretend to be for the user while they abuse the user.

Join me on the foss-side, we have source code. (Ddg has a cli search client just fyi)

Came here to say exactly this. It's time to embrace DuckDuckGo, I made the switch about 6 months ago, thought I would hate it. Expected the UX to drive me nuts after so long with the Google interface, but it made no difference. It's a really solid drop-in replacement.

The search, image, and shopping results have improved significantly over the past 6 months. Must be better ML. I now prefer it to Bing. Super easy to set it as default on iOS.

This might just be the thing that gets me to switch. I use "Show Image" for the image search all the time.

Same! If I want an image, I'm going to get it one way or another. Might as well use a tool that doesn't actively try to get in my way.

Edit: Well it seems this is from legal pressure from Getty. Unfortunately that reason isn't enough to stop me from switching.

You can still right-click -> View Image/Open image in new tab/etc., of course, but I do agree the Show Image button was handy.

Well no, it wouldn't be such a big deal if this was the case.

If you do that you usually end up with a low-resolution image on a url of the form https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?...

Do you? I don't. I'm using google.co.uk on PC, with both Chrome and Firefox, and can always freely get the image this way.

You do have to wait for the image to have fully loaded, mind, but otherwise it's quite literally embedding the image anyway - right-click, View Image, and you've got it.

You're right clicking the tiled image on the results page.

If you left click a result first to give it focus, and then right click->open in new tab you'll get the original, full size, image.

I remember how Yandex was making a toast out of Google image search (market share wise) by providing said button. I think that the whole inclusion of the button by Google was motivated by this competition and Russian market was the first to get it.

Guess what, I think yandex.com still has it too.

There are some Firefox and chrome add-ons that fix that issue. but I have yet to find something that fixes Facebook's link redirection. Anyone know of one?

FB Purity[0] includes cleaning link redirects and a lot else to try and make FB tolerable.

[0] https://www.fbpurity.com/

Oh wow, that is great. I wonder why it is not here https://addons.mozilla.org/

Good. I am going to need something to help my kids print coloring pages cleanly.