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Comment by kevin_thibedeau

4 hours ago

DDG is repackaged Bing. Used to be Yandex too but sanctions put an end to that.

We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point, let alone the vastly different UXs.

  • I stopped using DDG because whenever I search for information on a topic like "plumber's bread" all I get are the same 1500 sites serving the same top-10 lists of the same Amazon Affiliate links. Kagi neatly avoids all of that and serves me the dumb forum articles from 2006 that I'm looking for that describe what plumbers actually do when they want to stop up a wet pipe. This is a problem with nearly every ad-supported search engine. They all serve the same dumb top-10 lists and AI-authored blog articles about the same stuff ad-nauseum instead of inferring that I'm trying to research the answer to a question. The results all presuppose that I'm looking to buy something.

  • I find DuckDuckGo's search results to be terrible. I use Brave search and I find it to be the best. I've also tried Startpage and I like it better than DDG, but less than Brave.

    DDG often has scam sites for example when you search for FMHY, https://fmhy.net comes up on all other search engines, but fmhy [.] click comes up on DDG.

    Same with "anna's archive" returning the fake site annas-archive [.]io.

    • We’ll take a look at those two sites, thanks for reporting. We’re actively working to improve how we detect and remove scam sites, and getting specific reports is very helpful.

      3 replies →

  • I use DDG as my daily driver and quite like it. Then again, I don't really see much difference between DDG and Kagi, so I may be some sort of pleb. I will say that, sometimes, DDG gets "stuck" on certain sorts of close-phrase matches, rather than showing me the thing I'm looking for, but I've learned to recognize that behavior and append !g to it.