[raffraffraff]

Now they can have awful search results again.

I would love to be able to say "use ddg, they respect your privacy and they're almost as good as Google" but several times today I got mind-bogglingly bad results from it. Same search in Google... Yes, these are the results I was looking for.

What's really odd is that i reran one of those searches just now and the results aren't actually as bad. Super confused.

[ubercow13]

Yes I have noticed that ddg is extremely inconsistent over time, sometimes for what I think are almost the same queries. It's also highly variable in its speed - Google is almost always instant, but ddg can vary from the same speed as Google one day, to taking many seconds to load a result the next.

[djeiasbsbo]

I would like to recommend this to you: https://searx.space.

I have been getting great results across many instances! And while we're at it, also check out these projects:

https://github.com/omarroth/invidious

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

[empressplay]

I would speculate that DDG caches its results and then fuzzy-matches them with other search queries (maybe fuzzier and fuzzier based on load). So if you enter a similar query, you may get a previously-cached list of hits, which may or may not be as relevant as if your query was actually run. This is just speculation though