I debated bringing up Kagi at the top level here, since I already commented on it in a reply, but honestly I really want them to succeed and shit like this is why.<p>It's a paid search service, and I'm honestly really happy with that distinction and what it entails. Being paid means that they can deliver on and support features that users can use to get the best results for them, without worrying how those features may affect potential advertisers and their opinions of the service.<p>For example, you can block a whole site from your search results - and it's an easy-to-find button directly in the search results, not hidden deep within some settings or done via a manually-installed extension. They already deprioritize a whole lot of "junk" sites -- for example I very rarely see the kinds of technical results that are just reposts of Stack Overflow but laden down with their own ads, and if I do see them I can nuke the site from orbit, never to be seen again.<p>They are working out the kinks with the pricing scheme currently, but I've always found the plans fair and very transparent. If you are interested in good search and potentially giving the industry a bit of a hint that search is important enough to pay for, and all this advertiser-prioritized bullshit is unacceptable, I can wholeheartedly endorse them.
Hi all, Founder/CEO DuckDuckGo here and I hope I can help clear this up. Search syntax filters are still available on DuckDuckGo and we’ve re-updated the help page to reflect that. Nothing has actually recently changed with the way they work in terms of removing any functionality. In fact, we actually recently added functionality to make site exclusion work better as described in <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/updates" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/updates</a><p>What did happen is last month we temporarily updated our syntax help page because we had been getting complaints from some users that they were not working consistently and wanted to get to the bottom of it, but we never actually deactivated the features themselves.<p>Instead of removing that information from the help page, even temporarily, we should have said we know users are having problems and we’re working to address them. That's what the help page says now and we hope to provide an update soon.
I’ve also noticed that “”’s stopped working as expected there recently.<p>Sample query: “lowes pet bedding”. The quotation marks do something; they remove some results from tractor supply and home depot. However, many results don’t contain the word “lowes” or “bedding”. For example:<p><a href="https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/licensing/" rel="nofollow">https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/licensing/</a><p>And, none contain the exact phrase. Google does the expected thing (return one result). Annoyingly, the last time I checked, the situation was reversed, and Google search is now useless for other reasons.<p><i>Thirty seven</i> spam results surround the one organic google search result for the query. For the love of all that is good and proper, <i>thirty seven</i>?!? Who thought that was a good number?<p>That result page would make 90’s era pay-for-placement search engines blush!
My experience with both DDG, which I use as default, and Google, which I use as backup has been steadily deteriorating over time.<p>That is the opposite of what you would expect if incentives and business models around this most basic utility were not broken.<p>If people can build collectively incredibly useful resources like wikipedia and openstreetmap why not an index of the web as a public good that is devoid of the race to the bottom dynamics of SEO and adtech and whatnot.<p>Why do we need to worry about privacy violation and/or gross commercial bias when trying to access the most important information machinery invented in recent decades, the web?<p>Imagine you try to find your way in an unknown city and the only maps available are the sketchy freebies handed out at hotels, choke full of commercial ads, spam and fake entries.<p>We have normalized too much, we are accepting as inevitability suboptimal services. This is not theoretical and without systemic implications. Knowledge worker productivity - which is a large fraction of modern economies - depends on the speed and quality of information retrieval.<p>At some point people must snap out of the spell and work towards a sane internet that puts the interests of billions of users first.
This might be related to the bing API. I'm pretty sure Bing hiked their API access prices, effective may 1st 2023. Custom search is way more expensive than regular search too.<p>But I'd think duckduckgo wouldn't really be affected by public pricing, and that they have some sort of huge discounts and contracts that would protect them against this. If they pay anything that is, since I thought ddg generated revenue from using bing. Though Ecosia seems to have the same issue so who knows.<p><a href="https://www.computerworld.com/article/3688574/microsoft-more-than-triples-bing-search-api-prices-to-recoup-investments.amp.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.computerworld.com/article/3688574/microsoft-more...</a><p>Source on the price increases, seems like the API is now 3x to 10x more expensive (I used the MS docs directly but the article shows the previous rates too).
Things like this seem so arbitrarily hostile to intelligent people who just want to find what they're looking for in an efficient way. Why does this keep happening? Who benefits from these developments?
Ah yes, the classic corporate footgun. I am sure power users who are alienated will most definitely stay quiet and not complain to their peers, damaging the reputation of a once reliable tool. This has never happened before after all. :')
I've been keeping a directory of screenshots of poor DDG results for the past couple years and there have been many conspicuously broken results. It's a damn shame since 2+ years ago DDG was better.<p>Some examples:<p>- Double quoted strings ignored, continuing to return results without the quoted string.<p>- Adding the exclusion parameter doing nothing, continuing to return results with the string.<p>- Various queries return non-legit sites in the majority top 10 results or more—sometimes being <i>all</i> results. By non-legit, meaning: these are randomized named domains that have scraped other sites' content or are doing word salad query matching. Example query from December last year: `google "oauth" "api" "thunderbird"` returned all non-legit sites.<p>- Using `site:` parameter to restrict a query to specific site can return fewer results for that domain (eg: two results vs dozens) than just searching for the site name and query without the `site:` parameter.<p>- Using `site:` parameter to limit to TLD only sometimes returns only single result or nothing despite knowing there are domains that contain the query. Eg: last year when searching `opnsense site:.se` there should have been tons of results from teklager.se but there were none (I have the screenshots), but searching `opnsense site:teklager.se` returned results.<p>In the most egregious cases that I've documented I submit feedback but it always seemed like a hopeless cause the worse the results became.
Ugh, i just thought something was wrong with me, my queries or something in the last few days - the results have kinda turned to <i>bleep</i>..<p>My results have been looking like the code for Google Ads had some error and was stuck in a loop - resulting in page after page of advertisements :(<p>Example: roborock s8 disassembly (variants tried: roborock s8 teardown)<p>Same goes for Youtube - not a single disassembly video / teardown could be found, only reviews with cringy thumbnails..<p>This is after a number of years of using DDG and considering "good enough" most of the time, i seldomly had to result to !g - and like 50% of the time i had was to find other interesting content to augment what i had found so far...
Looks like they just rewrote the markdown file and the exclusion looks is still there in the additions?<p>Maybe it was reworded, or an attempt to reword it, because of this issue: <a href="https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/issues/160">https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/issues/1...</a>
I'm hoping that this is a commit that is reverted back, after some amount of backlash from the community, if at all this was intentional.<p>Else, it evokes the sentiment of riskynacho on the comment, "It's almost like DuckDuckGo wants to eliminate itself from being a safe useful alternative in the search engine competition."
I actually just switched back to google yesterday after a really frustrating time trying to get double quotes working for filtering.<p>I'm super disappointed in DDGs changes the last few months. I wish them the best but I'm on the hunt for a new search engine.
For what it’s worth: I have been using Ecosia as my preferred search engine. Basically it just forwards requests to Bing in exchange for ad revenue which is used to plant trees.<p>Have been able to use the advanced keywords and operators to filter results with Ecosia<p><a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-keywords-ea595928-5d63-4a0b-9c6b-0b769865e78a" rel="nofollow">https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-ke...</a>
<a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-options-b92e25f1-0085-4271-bdf9-14aaea720930" rel="nofollow">https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-op...</a><p>Sometimes the search results can be irrelevant especially for programming queries. But in those cases I just fallback to G
It's garbage lately. no better than Google. they are all shit now a days. they just promote their results. search is a misnomer these days.....it's an engine....for ads
I'm not entirely sure what market DuckDuckGo is trying to serve.<p>- Non-privacy-conscious people are just going to use Google.<p>- Privacy-conscious people know enough to realize that DuckDuckGo isn't really protecting your privacy, and that it's akin to using ExpressVPN or NordVPN to "hide your IP address".<p>Didn't they also have some kind of censorship uproar back in the day?
I noticed that and it is infuriating. Adding `-term` now seems to be the opposite and show only results containing the term you didn’t want in the first place. I seriously wonder who thought this was a good idea…
Can anyone explain why Google and DuckDuckGo made this change? I don't see how this impacts them selling ads. My only thought is its technically expensive to support?
It’s getting to the point where I’m thinking about downloading the Wikipedia archive, mirroring all of archive.org, downloading Common Crawl, etc., and then setting up some kind of super-powered offline query machine.
Curious how people use search these days.<p>For me, I'm less and less using a single search engine for all my needs, rather using a plethora of engines for different tasks.<p>I use DDG as my default engine to ensure I get privacy by default, and if the results aren't to my liking, I use a bang to re-run the search in a different engine.<p>I also like to set up custom search engines in my browser with shortcuts, so if I need to search a specific GitHub org or something I can quickly run a search there from my URL bar.<p>A lot of the comments here saying "DDG is dead, switch to xxx instead!" strike me as not particularly relevant with my usage patterns, but I'm wondering whether I'm just in a minority.
There are good reasons why the next generation just looks up videos.<p>The idea of a web search engine is disappearing into the mist of time. Text search engines worked well 10 years ago, but they are now completely overwhelmed by content farms.
It's ironic that one of the best search engines for technical searches we have today has become yandex (which still fully supports filters) and the only reason why is because their devs didn't go out of their way to ruin their service like the rest.<p>I mean even searching for a literal string (part number) doesn't give me results on Google/DDG anymore. I'd be happy to use yandex as my main search engine if I didn't have to (re)solve a captcha every couple of searches.<p>Are there other search engines that still allow us to run powerful search queries?
I personally feel like negative filters are important because they create an incentive for advertisers/SEO/etc people to not spam every keyword into their product.<p>If you're only allowed positive searches, the best way to get your product found is to maximize the number of positive search terms associated with your product. With negative search terms, every additional term you add is a potential exclusion criteria as well.<p>Unfortunately, people just don't use the negative search terms enough, so it is up to the search engines themselves to detect metadata bloat, and that ends up being a cat-and-mouse game.
Does anyone use Neeva? I have been for a few years, and pay for it. Loving it so far.<p>I was a heavy user of Google way back when, then moved to DDG for many, many years. Settling on Neeva.<p>However, I will check out Kagi now, maybe I will move again.
There is also a (related, I assume) PR to remove the search syntax page from being published entirely[1]. It's dated December, so it may be fair to assume this has all just been documentation-publishing that hasn't been done yet, as others have posited. That says nothing of the rationale/efficacy of such filtering/syntaxing, though.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/pull/152">https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/pull/152</a>
I really don't see a bright future for search engines. LLMs have exposed a new way to interact with knowledge, which is that, instead of sifting through results/webpages manually, they do that for us and present answers instead.<p>Sure, they have a ways to go (for example, i think they should provide confidence level for their answers based on how many docs/pages they ran into during training that support a particular answer; show references when asked etc) but the search engine as an interface is obsolete at this point.
Would encourage DuckDuckGo people who are looking for a new option to consider Ecosia - it also uses the Bing API so it has good indexing coverage - but does a much better job of postprocessing the results.
Why couldn't DuckDuckGo just offer an "advanced mode" in settings where operators are still active?<p>They could default to the simple one and achieve their goal.
I just used DuckDuckGo with filter, and it worked as expected (i.e., the filter still correctly filters).<p>E.g., search query: t-shirts -site:amazon.com
Who in their right mind would continue to rely on Kagi after the bait and switch? How many more "realities of the search market" will they need to learn? It amazes me that anybody would accept such an egregious betrayal, whether or not they can afford the new pricing.
Does no one here use searx?<p>I keep seeing Kagi being pushed and it seems suspicious as Kagi is a subscription based search engine that limits your searches to their paid tiers.<p>Kagi shillposting with their bot accounts?