[0xbadcafebee]

Has anyone else noticed 99% of DDG search results are now AI spam? I can't look for anything on DDG anymore, it's 100 pages of "Table of Contents" questions/answers by AI. It's like when recipe blogs took over the internet, but worse now, because I can't even get a reliable answer now.

[shawn_w]

I get a lot of links to local businesses that have nothing to do with what I'm searching for.

DDG has really dropped off in quality over the last couple of years. I'm about ready to try that paid search engine that keeps being mentioned here on HN.

[NayamAmarshe]

I've been using Brave Search for years and it's fantastic. I haven't used Google since and it supports Bangs! like DDG. It's free so you can give it a try.

[stanislavb]

I still use Google; however, Brave Search has been my default and it is good in most cases. Better than Bing (and DDG).

[mattl]

Did Brave give up on their cryptocurrency stuff?

[landolix]

It's a decent alternative to what Mozilla was doing to earn money.

[NayamAmarshe]

They've kinda realized that it's not going anywhere. So now they're focusing on products that can earn them revenue. Like AI features and search ads.

[donw]

Unsure, but I don’t see anything related to it these days

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

How to make sure Brave (the browser) gets some money if I'm not using their search engine? (I use Kagi)

[amusingimpala75]

I really liked Brave Search but unfortunately it started giving me captchas on every search after 11 pm Pacific or so for some (unknown) reason. They’re not even image captchas, you just click the button and wait 15-20 seconds which is pretty inconvenient.

[pythux]

Hi, Brave engineer here,

May I ask when you switched away from Brave Search? We've been doing work to reduce the amount of captchas a few months ago and we stopped getting feedback about this issue at that point. If it's still happening, it's something we will look into again.

Also, are you a user of ProtonVPN by any chance?

Thanks for your help,

[jatotebs]

Excellent browser. One issue with it though, when I close the browser I am expecting my history to be deleted as I set it up that way, but it turns out I have to manually close every tab before closing the browser for it to actually delete the history and that seems like a mistake. Otherwise, great browser. Though you should rip out all the Google stuff from it, literally every single thing that connects or touches that pos company.

[jonathansampson]

Sampson here, from Developer Relations at Brave. Would you mind telling me a bit more about how you have Brave configured, so that I can make sure local testing and troubleshooting on my end reflects your scenario accurately? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

You are presumably using the "Clear on Exit" feature, located within settings at brave://settings/clearBrowserData. When you select the "On Exit" tab of that view, which options do you have selected? Do you find that none of the data types are cleared when you close the browser (via › Exit), or only some of them are cleared?

I'm also curious about the state of two options within brave://settings/system, namely "Close window when closing last tab," and "Warn me before closing window with multiple tabs". Are both of these enabled?

Thank you in advance

[pythux]

Hey, let me forward that to someone more knowledgeable about this topic. We'll get back to you. Thanks for the feedback!

[NayamAmarshe]

Hi pythux, off-topic question but do engineers directly read the feedback or is it filtered for you by someone else?

[pythux]

It can be both, we have people who look at community feedback on a daily basis, but engineers also tend to be out there on HN and Reddit, etc. and today it was the case that I saw the comment and could jump in straight away.

[HKH2]

It's not good for images, unfortunately. Bing is way better for images.

[NayamAmarshe]

Yes, for images I just do !gi

[djaychela]

I've started using Kagi for any "important" searches and I have to say it works very well, quite a contrast to what DDG has now become.

[hakonslie]

I use kagi for everything

[atmanactive]

Kagi is my one and only search engine for few years now. What a breath of fresh air. It was, "back to sanity" for me.

[eth0up]

I'm relieved to see someone stating this. I get ignored (and dvoted) every time I criticize ddg, but I have no vested interested -- I simply find precisely what you mentioned and that it tends to suck in general.

[arktos_]

(Kagi, for anyone willing to do the same. It's great!)

[nerdponx]

Feels nice to know that I am literally a paying customer and at least in theory incentives should be somewhat aligned.

[landolix]

I thought DDG was a skin for bing? Maybe that's a bing issue.

[mrweasel]

Could be, but I don't think so, because I use Ecosia, which is even more of a Bing skin than DDG. DDG adds some of their own flair into the mix, but Ecosia is pretty much just Bing I believe. In any case I don't feel like I'm getting much in the way of AI spam. For the few searches I do try on Google, I think it's safe to say that Ecosia/Bing is now a better search engine that Google.

Realistically I think it has more to do with the terms your searching for, and not necessarily if one search engine is worse hit by spam, AI or otherwise.

[synicalx]

I just ran half a dozen identical searches on DDG and Bing, and yeah it looks like DDG is returning the same main results as Bing (if you ignore all the AI stuff at the top of Bing searches).

[Larrikin]

Which searches? I find myself only using the !g for very specific, rare, within the past year framework problems and trying to find local restaurants, but Google and Yelp suck for that too but are slightly better.

DDG and Google are both open when I'm looking for stock images for flash cards.

[ezekg]

Use Kagi. It doesn't have this problem.

[1317]

I don't get AI spam, but I have started getting recent news articles, generally starting from ~the end of page 1 and getting more and more common as you go further down. i find they contain maybe one word from my query in the title- so it's not just pulling them out from nowhere, but come on surely it can do better than that...

I switched to a different search engine (brave) to get away from it, the result quality seems about the same for english, but not as good for other languages- it's not amazing but it'll do

[mindracer]

I’ve been seeing this in DDG too, pretty annoying. I usually end up switching over to Google but will try Brave now you mention it

[486sx33]

DDG search seems to fill 95% of my needs. 5% of the time I have to switch to Google , usually for reviews or some strange maps link / interface. I suppose reviews are part of Google maps too, so really I only need that. Need is questionable but it’s there and easy

[ben_w]

I've not encountered this myself, but I can believe you do.

Over the last 12 months or so I was getting that problem with Google, but they seem to have realised that a lot of people were saying that and changed. Whatever Google did wrong for my searches a year ago — and perhaps even that was "not keeping ahead in the race against hostile SEO" — it's entirely possible DDG is doing wrong for your searches right now.

[ravenstine]

I sometimes have to use DDG when I'm in private browsing mode (I don't feel like setting it up for Kagi), and have noticed that DDG has become complete junk. Not only does it seem to be highly sanitized but it's full of crappy results. Yeah, every search engine has bad results, especially The Google, but DDG has seen the sharpest decline in quality. I used to be a fan!

[voytec]

Depends on what you're looking for. With news, I'm often getting 2 pages almost fully stuffed with msn.com links

[riffraff]

not perticularly, probably depends on what you're looking for.