[potsandpans]

It's pretty amazing. I forget what I was searching the other day, but it was a fairly straightforward general programming question. First page google results were blogspam and weird aggregate sites. I went to ddg, pasted the same question and got a serverfault top result that answered my question precisely.

[hedora]

I like ddg, but they recently stopped honoring quotation marks, and google started honoring them again.

Google search is still generally unusable, but when DDG goes into “too few hits” mode, I find myself using g! to good effect.

This is after using DDG for about a decade, and never once having g! produce better results than it.

Anyway, I’m confident that llm integrated search will make these problems 100x worse. Now, if it can’t find questionable blogspam, it’ll just start pathologically lying. Great.

[nmfisher]

Counter-anecdote - I was searching for an error message verbatim recently (can't remember if I used quotation marks or not). Google literally had zero results, but the first DDG result was the exact one I needed.

Given how fresh the DDG result was (< 48 hours, from memory), I did wonder if Google was slower in updating their index.

[nly]

I've been using ddg for years but I still have to use !g almost daily when searching for a particular page on particular domains because ddg just seems not to want to index them properly.