Per DDG's own help pages, they use mostly Bing and no Google. (The mixture of over 400 sources that they claim is used to provide the infobox-type results, which they call "Instant Answers", not the regular search results)
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
I disagree. I've tried to switch to DDG several times too, and always go back to StartPage, which is a proxy for Google, and the results were always better even without profiling. There is a case to be made for Google having better results globally from aggregate user behaviour though.
No G, I didn't want to search for what you suggested, really not.
Once DDG is big enough, they will be forced to do the same.
Sure - this invades your privacy. But it leads to good results and a better experience.
You really don't want to give up your privacy in exchange for nothing. But this doesn't feel like the case here.
It's also just as good for location things. If I'm in different neighborhoods - I can type one letter in - and Google will pop up the right restaurant - and then in one or two clicks I can make an order.
This feels like a trade I can live with. I get it that a lot of people can't.
This definitely doesn't help in India. If you live in the US, Brave/DDG can probably serve you better local results. It's abysmal in India. Google local results in India are orders of magnitude better here.
I tried to use DDG, but now I don’t because I never knew whether it was just my DDG search that had been unsuccessful or whether there were truly no results.
In fact, I wouldn’t know with any search engine whether there are “truly no results”, so I use G because I prefer to get what’s widely accepted to be the closest results possible.
The thing with people who switch to DDG is, they do so consciously for privacy reasons but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling. But that doesn't mean that DDG's results can't be as good as G's, it just means you need to add that context yourself. Like if you search for a coding problem, add your computer language name to the search query. Or if you're search for a restaurant, add in your home town too.
I've found DDG's results to be comparable to Google's and in fact in the last ~3 years of exclusively using DDG, I can count on one hand the number of times I've tried searching for something in Google after a failed search in DDG.
Image searching is a little more hit and miss though. G's image search is better -- generally speaking. However DDG doesn't include Pinterest spam. So if you're after something specific using image searching, Google is better. But if you're after a general list of usable images, then DDG is better.