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 modera
Yep, use to recommend it but it’s just got generic even when filters are set to off, also the ai shit is annoying tho I respect them for not shoving it down my throat. I guess I’ll just wait for ladybug search engine to drop. PS: if anyone’s looking to compile I’ll save you the trouble cause for now it’s only a webview in an app. You could go to DDG or google to search but it’s not a nice experience
Ladybird looks cool. It’s the first ever newsletter I have ever knowingly signed up for.
Too bad it’s expected for 2026
feels censored to me. i wouldn’t be surprised if u had poor results for torrenting websites.
It is. There are sites that I know the url of that dont show up in results.
One site I’ve seen with this behaviour is smspool.net. No matter what you search on DDG, it won’t come up.
duck duck go is showes Bing results. maybe Microsoft is doing somthing.
I also noticed a change. From one day to the next I suddenly got lots of reddit links in the top results
I also noticed redoing a search sometimes yields different results despite using the exact same keywords.
Maybe it’s a fairness strategy? Rather than show everyone the same list so that only the top 3 get all the clicks, they rotate them to spread the traffic.
I had the same and just realised that the order of the results got rearranged.
Which search engine is good to find pirate sites and other general websites
They don’t show up there for obvious reasons. Also sites disappear frequently, or move to new domains. You have to use alternative ways, bookmark megathreads and other collections where some other people frequently update the links, something for start:
- On lemmy: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com read the sidebar
- https://wiki.dbzer0.com/piracy/megathread/
- On github: https://github.com/Shakil-Shahadat/awesome-piracy
- Some good links are here as well: https://fmhy.net/
Yandex is best for this
The search engine built into qbittorrent is good as well.
I probably wouldn’t use it as a main search engine because I don’t know how trustworthy it is, but whenever I can’t find some obscure piece of media or something I’ve had amazing results from Yandex
TIL I learned DDG is bing and it’s like being diagnosed with cancer.
Correct; there are many such cases, this map shows a bundle of bing proxies
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.
Use Searxng. I always wanted to branch out of DDG and now this is push I needed.
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
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.
it’s OK to me btw, no problem at all. duckassist is nice also idk what are u sayin
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.
just change search results to be located in Greece and you won’t have any ads
DDG’s results have always been bad in my experience. Unless I’m searching for the most basic, general stuff, more often than not I find more irrelevant results than relevant ones (if I find any relevant ones at all.)
Not to say that Google is much better. I’ve noticed a steady decline in relevance over the past 15 years.
These days if I want an actual answer to something, I still have to add site:reddit.com to my queries. That or ask an AI and hope it’s not hallucinating some bullshit. It may be full of shit, but at least AI understands what I’m looking for.
Because it’s just bing under the hood, same as qwant. And Bing/microshaft doesn’t really care that much about you using it for actual search. M$hit wants you to use Copilot. Copilot cannot be fit as easily into meta search engines such as SearxNG. I’m quite convinced that the whole push behind the aggressive AI promotion going hand in hand with search engine experience degradation (ACCELERATED BY THE PROLIFERATION OF SEOMAXXING AI-SLOP ONLINE) is to a large extent driven by the desire to tighten the walled gardens and information control. Millions of idiots convinced that a text generator program is somehow similar to an actual person would more readily accept it providing opinions or censored information, in place of diverse information.
Congratulations to all of you still happily trading your freedom for convenience. Instead of just a ranking algorithm that nonetheless can show you multiple results at a glance, you get the generation of just one result, at the environmental cost much higher than a regular search, up to 10 times more energy, and sometimes even slower than what would be the time required to load a regular page on a good LTE connection if modern web wasn’t so bloated.
All while accelerating the march towards digital feudalism. Because even the immense amount of storage space and link capacity required to build your own search index is nothing compared to the cost of training a LLM and then providing it via some SaaSS.
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…
Well i dont search anythibg anymore i just have an ai that searches with searxng then answers based on results from that.
How do you do that?
Found some python code that can act as a openai api proxy. Wrote an ai agent with langchain search tools persistent memory image generators sandboxed code execution environment calculator etc. Use an uncensored llm via openrouters, openai api for vector embedding, locality hosted stable diffusion. Locally hosted searxng. Then i can use any openai api compatable frontend and just point it at my proxy and have an advanced agent in almost any environment.
Havnt published it yet was thinking i could give it an autogpt or baby agi backend but havnt had any success with that yet.
DuckDuckGo is just a bing proxy. I think Microsoft is working on optimizing it for their copilot thing.
Huh? Doesn’t DDG uses the os default webview?
The DuckDuckGo search engine gets it’s results from the Bing search engine
Bing powers so much of the alternative (meta)sphere
Yeah I’ve experienced it too and switched to startpage.
