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duckduckgah

2021-02-04

So, google search results have trended less and less useful as time goes on. I've used them since they were an experimental search page hosted on the Stanford university servers. These days when I search for something, I get back a bunch of useless crap that google thinks I meant to ask for instead of the stuff that I actually did ask for. It's infuriating.

For a while I thought that duckduckgo would be a decent alternative. When I started with them a few years back, it felt like they were returning the results that I thought google should have been giving me.

Alas, that was then. These days ddg has somehow surpassed google in the "useless garbage results" metric.

Instead of returning stuff that I supposedly "really wanted" that is occasionally almost helpful, ddg goes a step beyond and actively ignores things that I've asked for. Opting instead to offer me results completely unrelated to my query.

Quoting words apparently no longer marks them as required. The search query now seems to just pick words that are easy to find in the index and returns whatever is floating at the top.

The only thing more useless is every other search engine. We're somehow back in the computing dark ages as far as web searching is concerned.