I know that jumping in to mention Kagi has become a meme on HN, but I do think it's important to keep encouraging people to move away from Google. The specific search engine barely even matters, as much as I like Kagi. The only way that any of these search engines are going to improve is if more people leave Google in the dust.
If people don't want to pay for Kagi, then use Brave Search. DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that.
>DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that.
I've seen this a lot lately, but no one has said why.
I solely use DDG and have done so for a long time. I have not noticed any specific changes, nor any degradation in my search results. I don't pay much attention to announcements or anything, so maybe I missed something?
Can you or someone please tell me how/why DDG is suddenly not recommended and "gone downhill"?
In one of the comments I made elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned that my experience with DDG is that it's become extremely "PG-rated" even if you turn off safe search. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but to me it's pretty clear to me that DDG is way more normie-safe than when I began using it several years ago. DDG shows me more of what I consider detritus than Kagi does. It's extremely bad at finding any results by exact text, but to be fair, every search engine is bad at this now. And finally, DDG hasn't had what I would consider to be worthwhile feature improvements in a very long time. The doodads that sometimes show up when you use a particular term like "qr code hello world" are neat, but ultimately not that beneficial in contrast to being given more control over the results themselves. Their other features are mostly things that have been solved many times over.
If people don't want to pay for Kagi, then use Brave Search. DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that.