• Trashboat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      I’ve been using it for years at this point, and I really prefer it to google. For most of my common/easy searches, it gets what I want pretty reliably. Occasionally I’ll have more obscure searches where I do have to switch back to Google, but honestly Google feels less and less helpful for that as time goes on. To add, DDG has bangs which are just wonderfully handy. Turning your search into a google search is as simple as adding “!g” to your query, and it’ll redirect the search. There are tons of other ones too, it’s a really nice feature that makes DDG more convenient in a lot of cases. Very much worth trying out at least

    • Veraxus@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It’s really good these days. Kagi is still the beat, but if you want free, DDG is the way to go.

      • Mog_fanatic@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I’ll have to give this kagi a shot I never heard of it! DDG just doesn’t ever seem give me what I want and I’ve been trying it forever. It’s like I’m always playing this cat and mouse game with the search engine and it just gives me alllllmost what I want but not quite.

        • kbotc@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          It’s not free, but I find it worthwhile. I really hope Apple includes it as a default engine in the next update.

          Kagi doesn’t sell you shit, so if you use Google for that, you can’t get that replacement data:

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Free Google (& other) proxy: SearXNG

      Further reading / Instances: Searx.space

      One good instance: SearXNG.site


      For basic searches (kinda a Bing reseller with disappointing results): DuckDuckGo

      Vote-with-your-wallet alternative: Kagi (who may have astroturfed or may have not, but great engine at $10/mo unlimited - have tried their free trial)

      Comments of mine RE: why everybody’s just reselling search ($1b+/yr to operate your own crawler): one and two

    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      It struggles when you have more than one word, it will ignore context and give you results with maximum number of either word. Still better than Google at this point, though.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 months ago

      works fine for me, and their implementation of AI (only letting it use wikipedia and maybe some select other sources) is pretty nice IMO, perfect for answering questions like “how many people live in X Y Z cities in total?”.