Is DDG Becoming Unusable?

I've noticed something similar, DDG has been increasingly ignoring my keywords, especially when I put quotes around them, and returning irrelevant results. It used to be that if you had two words with quotes around them it would tend to return results with both keywords, now it seems to return results with only one of the keywords. I think the scope of searches has declined also, I can search for things I know exist and DDG won't find them. The more marginal the search, on the fringes outside of what is most popular, the less capable DDG seems to be in finding results. Maybe they shrank the size of their database or excluded a lot of the less connected sites from their search?

It’s the curse of popularity!

As soon as gaming a search engine becomes financially profitable, the hoards of “SEO”s develop methods to do so.

On plus side, this means ddg is finally getting noticed, on the minus side, this means they need to react fast or lose ground to the competition that’s relatively better able to fend off spam.

Btw, this is also why search engines only grow big (or go home). Fending off spam is very very expensive and thankless job!

I'd recommend giving Kagi a try. I've been using it for 4 months now as my default search engine, and it's excellent.

As long as you put Pinterest filter in your unlock filter, ddg image search is usable. I tried brave image search and it was pathetic, same as google or ddg without fiters.

Why don't search engines actively sabotage Pinterest?/

Gave up on DDG and now selfhost my own instance of searxng.

its as good as it ever was for me, though admittedly I use search.brave often as fallback

Honestly since Brave search launched, I never bothers with DDG. brave is just so much better.

I've noticed the same with the search results from Brave. It started about 3 months ago and it's really frustrating. But apparently they don't use Bing. It's a strange coincidence.

I've been using Startpage for a while now and am quite content. It's essentially a privacy-preserving frontend for Google, so you get the result quality without the data trace.

Same for me, I’ve found myself…shudder using Bing more often.

Don't use g! use s! if you're going to do that. If you use !g almost every time you may as well just go to google from the beginning

Ddg is bing. It's literally the same now. Ha ha

For me it hasn't degraded (or, possibly, I haven't noticed it). I think it really depends on type of searches you usually do.

I still think it's fine, way better than Google. Google gives too many 'sponsored' results.

DDG is just bing of course.

I have been getting very strange results periodically. Switching browsers for a while usually fixes the issue.

I started seeing DDG TV advertising in the UK recently mocking Google tracking.

Searches frequently hang for me past year, thought was network but Google is fine.

whats ddg?

data driven gevelopment?

edit: okay duckduckgo lol

i hate it, still low quality search results for most of my use cases in programming related search.

for code related questions DDG has always been awful, that's for sure.

Still a great shot stopper, but there are much better goalkeepers than him around now. Goalkeeping isn’t all about stopping shots, the top teams want to build from the back and a goalkeeper who can actually play football with their feet is paramount to that. Keepers like Allison and Ederson are miles ahead of DDG in that regard.