I agree that Google is slipping... but DDG is essentially just a Bing syndicator, which means their result quality will compete at the rate of Bing. Hard to see a threat there.
Bing is now starting to be scary good in some regards.
One of my clients have integrated their intranet solution with Microsoft and if I search on Bing while logged in I get relevant results from both the Internet and the company network!
Two observations:
- I'd not accept if Google did this (like many others I was a fanboy, and like someone said: Google have worked hard tp make me dislike them - and they have now succeeded. Between years of insultingly mismatched ads, search quality dropping 10 years ago and staying lower than before and the whole witch hunt affair a few months ago I now do dislike them.)
- Google had this, or at least search on my machine and on internet working with Google Desktop Search already back in 2006! (Of course they killed GDS after I think they'd ruined the market for everyone else by pushing the best solution for free for a couple of years.)
DDG do far more work then just syndicating Bing. The have their own crawl, combine many sources, and are much stronger at down weighting low vaulue content.
For many they also have an up hill battle against Google as personalising search results to your interests is a double edged sword.
Unfortunately DDG is really only useful for english search results. I tried running it as my default search engine, but in most places it's more or less useless.
Great for non-english results for me, I simply search with !ddgde which flips the "Germany"-switch to on.
You and others keep saying this, but you really need to mention which non-English languages you are talking about as at least some of them are pretty good.
They show a switch for me even when I search in English.
With google, I sometimes wish I had an easy switch like that when the terms are also available in English as currently this makes their results useless.
!ddgde is indeed a bit long, but as most of my searches are not local, I can live with it ;)
> It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world.
No, that’s something you put into my mouth.
This is why I was asking. Unlike others, I explained which language works great. "Doesn’t work" is useless without saying what it doesn’t work for. "Does/Doesn’t work for language X" is actually relevant information.
Plus !bangs they kept it useful for me before I got used to their search. I rarely !g nowadays and being able to quickly dip in and out of sites for specific things is great. Like a super ‘I’m feeling lucky’ with parameters.
Well Google is only good if you're looking for paid reviews/blog posts and populist articles from very popular media outlets. I should hope people would realise how far their search quality has decreased in the past 2-3 years (for text search)
