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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It also doesn't wrap the URL of search results in a Google redirect URL, so you can Right Click > Copy to get the actual URL of the webpage or image.