[RankingMember]

I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has decided to stop letting me see. (I tried DDG but for my use it's been worse than Google).

[siva7]

Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com

[pooploop64]

This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics.

There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts.

It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the approved Hammertech GripGlove that plays ads and is slippery.

Or you could use a random rock with a flat side, which is a much better hammer than that in every way. In the exact same fashion, Yandex blows Google out of the water. Not because they have smarter people running it or because the code is more elegant or because they have more money. They just don't have the means or motivation to actively screw with you to the same degree as Google, and that makes it better.

Anyone at this point could make a better search engine than google just by running a basic text search algorithm and not doing anything else, it just so happens that Yandex never bothered to go as far beyond that as the mainstream ones.

[alberto-m]

Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.

[tardedmeme]

I think this way about Marginalia Search. It's just a search engine someone threw up for the sake of making a search engine and by the sake of merely not being crap it's actually pretty decent if the thing you're looking for is in its index set (lots of tech stuff). I think the most impactful thing is that it doesn't index seoslop.

[ttoinou]

Yandex is big and has probably good engineers

[amelius]

I suspect it has more to do with incentives.

[ai_slop_hater]

It's not "obscure." Yandex is Russia's Google.

[seviu]

Not crazy, I always resort to yandex when I know google is not showing me the results I am looking for

DDG doesn’t click for me sadly, and I cannot point my finger to where or why

[kevin_thibedeau]

DDG is repackaged Bing. Used to be Yandex too but sanctions put an end to that.

[yegg]

We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point, let alone the vastly different UXs.

[throwway120385]

I stopped using DDG because whenever I search for information on a topic like "plumber's bread" all I get are the same 1500 sites serving the same top-10 lists of the same Amazon Affiliate links. Kagi neatly avoids all of that and serves me the dumb forum articles from 2006 that I'm looking for that describe what plumbers actually do when they want to stop up a wet pipe. This is a problem with nearly every ad-supported search engine. They all serve the same dumb top-10 lists and AI-authored blog articles about the same stuff ad-nauseum instead of inferring that I'm trying to research the answer to a question. The results all presuppose that I'm looking to buy something.

[gtfiorentino]

I searched for “plumber’s bread” on DuckDuckGo and this was the 3rd result which seems to match what you’re looking for - https://www.finehomebuilding.com/forum/plumbers-bread-sandwi.... I do see the other kind of results you’re talking about too, though.

[AussieWog93]

I never had this experience with Kagi, sadly. I know a lot of people here love it but I found it had the same problems as Google.

I wonder if it's a regional thing.

[ikt]

https://www.ecosia.org/search?q=plumber%E2%80%99s+bread&addo...

afaik Ecosia is a blend of Google and Bing now while they work on their own engine

How does this compare?

[Cider9986]

I find DuckDuckGo's search results to be terrible. I use Brave search and I find it to be the best. I've also tried Startpage and I like it better than DDG, but less than Brave.

DDG often has scam sites for example when you search for FMHY, https://fmhy.net comes up on all other search engines, but fmhy [.] click comes up on DDG.

Same with "anna's archive" returning the fake site annas-archive [.]io.

[gtfiorentino]

We’ll take a look at those two sites, thanks for reporting. We’re actively working to improve how we detect and remove scam sites, and getting specific reports is very helpful.

[Cider9986]

Very cool, thanks.

Here is the list of all the official sites for FMHY (https://fmhy.net/other/backups)

I'm sure they would be happy with any combination of these 3.

1. fmhy.net

2. reddit.com/r/freemediaheckyeah

3. github.com/fmhy/FMHY

As for Anna's, it changes often, but it would be good to only allow the ones listed on the Wikipedia for sites that are posing to actually be Anna's Archive, rather than accessory sites like Github, link directories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive#:~:text=URL,a...

annas-archive.pk

annas-archive.gd

annas-archive.gl

[fanf2]

It would be nice if DDG could get rid of the umpteen shitty wikipedia mirrors that clutter up the results.

[Cider9986]

As for my allegation of terrible results. I think it mainly comes down to low quality sites being prioritized. I didn't want to make up search queries, so I decided to just go through my history to find my searches on Brave and compare the results with DDG.

"scientology speedrun instagram"

Brave returns mostly news articles in the main results and only a specific Instagram reel. Brave has an area for videos which is particularly relevant, but DDG has a carousel thing for news. DDG returns an Instagram and Tiktok area for the topic and an X account. Then Wikipedia and Knowyourmeme.

I would say DDG actually wins here because it is very much more on topic with the social media sites being resulted (X, IG, TikTok), but the results feel less clickable to me because those social media sites are so unfriendly to adblocking, VPN using, not-signed-in users.

"fisa news"

Brave shows a really nice variety of specific news article updates as well as primary sources like a .gov. DDG does similarly, but it's really only news and it is really a smattering of different mainstream news websites. That's fine, but then there's also that carosel which is 100% filled with Yahoo and Foxnews, which I consider both to be low-quality.

Another big problem with DDG in this specific search is there are quite a few simple links to news website's tag on fisa, which isn't helpful to me.

I'm not the happiest about either results, but Brave wins because of the lack of slop from yahoo as well as the primary source results.

who is the highest level scientologist who left

Neither DDG nor Brave returns any immediate actual answers in websites, but by automatically returning the AI summary, I get a satisfying answer from Brave's AI.

"sovereignty"

I was surprised, but DDG totally wins this one. Brave doesn't have that built in dictionary result, DDG does. Brave also has a news carosel which is not relevant. Pretty comparable with the other results, but definitely a win for DDG.

Actually, what's the deal with putting the "search assist" at the bottom. That's pretty weird.

I think a lot of my bias against DDG comes from the UI. Brave seems friendlier, rounder, easier to read.

Hopefully this helps.

[stavros]

I use DDG as my daily driver and quite like it. Then again, I don't really see much difference between DDG and Kagi, so I may be some sort of pleb. I will say that, sometimes, DDG gets "stuck" on certain sorts of close-phrase matches, rather than showing me the thing I'm looking for, but I've learned to recognize that behavior and append !g to it.

[yegg]

Well, I'd love to know; as I've said in some other comments, we've changed and improved a lot in the last couple years and so feel free to send me feedback.

[ldng]

Have you ?

I've been a ddg user full time for 15+ years and I did see it improve quite lot over time. But quality dropped when Yandex was cut off.

Lately, I've noticed YET AGAIN being trapped in a bubble with results being to clever for their own good ... I did leave Google PRECISELY for the bubble effect ...

Not even mentioned the AI shenanigans with ridiculous results at times. DDG is not immune to enshitification. Way too many managers thinks they know better than the user ... they don't.

[muppetman]

A bet the stupid name doesn’t help.

I know what you mean though, I use it but it’s never quite right. Hard to say exactly why.

[pooploop64]

My sister thought it was malware when she was seeing ads for it. Something about the whole overall branding is just bad.

[yegg]

Sorry you feel that way, pooploop64. We are doing a complete brand refresh this year though.

[kryogen1c]

This has me absolutely howling.

I use Bing at work for no other reason than sheer laziness, really. You've inspired me to return to DDG.

Keep on keepin on, yegg.

[yegg]

Thank you!

[jakeydus]

Dang, did I just see someone get rimjobsteve-d in the wild?

[futune]

Having a stupid name is tables stakes in the search space.

[flir]

Someone round here said Yandex shows you what you searched for, while Google shows you what it thinks you should have searched for.