It’s been statistically indistinguishable or better than Google for at least a decade.
Google intentionally serves bad results now to juice ad impressions (according to sworn testimony from their execs), so I assume DDG is significantly better these days.
I tried to switch to DDG multiple times within the last decade and it was very clearly worse than Google even as Google declined. There would be zero relevant results on page 1, I switch to Google, plenty of relevant results. This happened every single day.
I have literally never had that experience with any of the following search engines:
- DDG
- Kagi
- Bing (10+ years ago)
- Yahoo (I'm getting old...)
I searched by typing lists of keywords into the search box in the past. Maybe you're one of those people that types sentences, or relies heavily on synonym matching? (Which finally works now, but only if you turn on LLM mode -- even then, Google shipped that months or years after kagi, and the reviews are scathing vs. the performance I get out of the Kagi AI search.)
[–] autoexec 2 days ago
[–] hedora 2 days ago
Google intentionally serves bad results now to juice ad impressions (according to sworn testimony from their execs), so I assume DDG is significantly better these days.
[–] eudamoniac 1 day ago
[–] hedora 1 day ago
- DDG
- Kagi
- Bing (10+ years ago)
- Yahoo (I'm getting old...)
I searched by typing lists of keywords into the search box in the past. Maybe you're one of those people that types sentences, or relies heavily on synonym matching? (Which finally works now, but only if you turn on LLM mode -- even then, Google shipped that months or years after kagi, and the reviews are scathing vs. the performance I get out of the Kagi AI search.)
[–] 2PqboPPmKegvanx 1 day ago
[Citation Needed]