> After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches

I've had DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for years and I couldn't disagree with this more. DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes. Their depth of indexing sites like Reddit feels dramatically worse lately and recipe search will predictably give me the same list of SEO spam blogs regardless of what I type in.

DuckDuckGo also seems to be doing the YouTube search thing that everyone hates where after the first several results it just starts throwing semi-related things at you instead.

I still add "!g" to my DuckDuckGo queries when I don't have time to mess around or if the first page of results is obvious SEO spam.

The other main point in this blog post isn't really about Google at all, it's just what happened when the author set up a a new e-mail address and didn't sign up for a lot of sites with it:

> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.

I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.

I had a similar experience with DDG. I felt like I had to add “!g” to everything, which doesn’t actually move one away from Google, it just creates friction.

Kagi, however, has been a different experience for me. I haven’t felt the need to go to Google at all. If I can’t find it with Kagi, I’m confident I won’t find it with Google either. There have also been several times where I was on an outage call with a double dozen people all looking for answers to some issue. Everyone was coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find something that solved the issue pretty quickly with Kagi.

Same experience with DuckDuckGo. I've probably been using it as my primary search engine for, well, I'm not absolutely sure, but I want to say it was sometime during the pandemic so that must be, what, 5 years?

Honestly, it's got to the point where 8 or 9 times out of 10 I switch to Google search because I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting... and really it's at the point where, why am I even still using it?

It's just not very good.

It reminds of something like AltaVista back in the day, or one of those other old skool search engines, with how poor its results are relative to evil old Google.

> from Reddit threads

Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1].

[1] https://www.lifewire.com/google-reddit-deal-8685766

Well, yes, DuckDuckGo is not Google. You have to accept that. Not just surface-level, but for real.

What made this easy for me is that Google is also no longer Google. Ever since it started basically ignoring my actual search query, I stopped using it. I used to be very good at using Google, too.

DuckDuckGo is quite bad at times, yes. But then, so is Google. If I need to find something I cannot put into search terms, LLMs are helpful. From my trial experience I would say Kagi is also a capable search machine, for some niches.

DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes.

Agree with this. DDG just seems to have less ‘in’ it.

I’ve been playing with old 8052 microcontrollers recently, and it’s not unusual for DDG to return zero results on slightly esoteric technical searches, when Google will have plenty of relevant results (and it’s not just that Google is less strict about search terms - often I’m searching specifically for keywords).

There’s queries and there’s queries. Many queries are effectively undefined bookmarks. You know this exists but haven’t saved it but your know a few key words to get to it. “Rustdoc moka api”. And then there’s the “I’m researching a subject queries”. Google used to be useful for both. But for the later case it send to have gotten worse. Which is irrelevant because LLMs are so much better. So people will use LLMs for these usecases. So Google search basically becomes a phonebook. And that’s easy to emulate. Their calculator is still my go to though

Google's indexing is insanely quick too, I'll post a question on Reddit and I search Google and the reddit thread is there same day/minutes which is funny. False hope thinking someone else had my problem but it's me.

Weird, I switched to DDG years ago, I used !g for a couple of years, but I don't really ever use Google anymore. I don't seem to struggle to find things, so I wonder what's up. Maybe I'm just training myself to be OK with something that isn't optimal. That said, Google seems pretty spammy these days (i.e. actual search results below the fold in many cases).

I also ditched Google years ago for DuckDuckGo, but its not without problems for sure. Often times still full of obviously fake sites in results, that I try to report them. Many times it just returns nothing where Google still manages to give results. And I still have to scroll through their ads when I am on a machine without an adblocker (like Firefox Focus/Klar on Android). But I still rather use them than Google, if I don't find something it is usually not the end of the world and I just move on. Recently, I switched all my browsers to their noai site, on some I still have the lite version, I think.

I felt this way until about a year or 2 ago, google has gotten so bad DDG is not worse for my uses

I don't dig in reddit frequently so that specific issue is not one for me

I have basically the same experience of trying DuckDuckGo, getting useless results if the search is outside the domain of the handful of sites I already know, and then trying Google. But I find Google usually also returns useless sites.

ChatGPT is the only general-purpose search engine that seems to have any chance of producing a link that is both new to me and useful. Of course, I try not to use it too much, people say it’s bad for the planet or whatever.

100% agree. My default is also DuckDuckGo, but I know for a fact that if the search is anything other than finding the homepage of a company, I'm gonna struggle with duck. I still use it because I want to not use Google, but Google is 10000000% a superior product.

That is also my experience with DuckDuckGo but all search engines. They ALL suck including Google Search. I don't know why, but the results are simply crap.

> I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.

I don't read that. Where do you see a backwards justification? Do you know the decision-making steps? I simply don't see how you can conclude this, unless you assume it. In which case the assumption may easily be totally incorrect.

Exactly my experience too, to the point that I kinda ended up only using DDG for its bang features and never really do real searches with it... It's especially bad if I want local results for my country in my language.

Agreed...mostly. I've been using DDG for many years on and off (shoot, since they first became a thing), and for about 3 years full time. About 15% of my searches end with me adding !g to the end to perform a Google search. Google gets things right another 5-10% of the time. For the oddest of searches, I have to tweak my search terms several times to even attempt to figure out the answer.

Search is hard.

Breaking up with Google is even harder, but definitely worth it. I still have a Gmail account that is used for spam/low effort email nonsense (I currently use hey.com for most email...a decision I am considering revisiting in the future since I've found a good way to host my own email with a provider that won't get auto rejected/blacklisted). That and the searches I mentioned above are my only use of Google Products at this point in time. Maps is gone. Photos is just a memory. I kicked Android out the door years ago. All my home integrations are via open source and/or Apple, and I'm finding ways to NOT have to rely on even Apple for that.

I never really used docs or other services. For storage I am currently using OneDrive and iCloud, however I am about to push all of the cloud storage stuff to Backblaze and Cloudflare.

While I almost never see ads, when I do see them, I notice that they are never targeted ads. Even some of the odd "coincidences" have gone away...say, verbally chatting with my spouse about how I am thinking about buying such and such a product...only to see an ad for it later on (and assuming it was a coincidence)...things like that have stopped.

I've also been avoiding Amazon as well, for the same reason.

Just my 2 cents.

Kagi has been an upgrade compared to DuckDuckGo for me.

It’s hard to describe but the results are just better, and it loads incredibly fast.

With DDG I always had this 20% wish to have Google back and frequently queries with !g bangs, not so much with Kagi.

This is exactly my experience. I've had it as my primary search engine for 6-7 years now but add !g to about 80% of queries.

Happy user of the DDG mobile browser though.

I wouldn't say DDG is worse, I'd say it's equally as bad. Both Google and DDG are full of AI slop now. Often the entire first page is full of wrong generated content.

At least DDG lets you block results which Google does not.

It seems like every search devolves long enough to returning anything for fear of existential dread that the user will think you did something wrong wrong. Outlook ignores almost all context to just return partial matches

Clearly YMMV but I have been very happy with DDG since switching over a couple of years ago. Maybe we are searching in different domains. From my experience, no ads and less ai slop, and fine search quality.

The image search is terrible on DDG. If I search for multiple keywords, the search only cares if an image matches just one word. Google ranks the results so that images that match all the keywords are presented at the top.

Give Google two more years and Google will be as bad as ddg/bing.

What if we had more specialized search engines? There should be a recipe aggregator that searches for recipes and nothing else, and prioritizes high value recipe sites.

Yeah, the article is slop. Not even AI slop. More like guilty conscience slop.

I ran an experiment where I set DDG as my default on all surfaces. About 3 - 4 months in, I actually started hating searching, and a few weeks later most of my queries had the prefix !g

Gmail is hands down the best. I pay for Gemini, and Gemini outside gmail is much much better than Gemini inside gmail. I pay for ChatGPT, but for some reason, I trust Gemini with my email rather than ChatGPT.