• pyre@lemmy.world
    10·
    14 hours ago

    DDG is not bing. using bing’s index and being bing are two different things, and by the way, I’d use bing over Google’s shitty ass shit every day.

    • endless_nameless@lemmy.world
      51·
      23 hours ago

      I fucking hate ai but ddg’s ai summary is the one place I don’t mind it. It doesn’t open unless I click it, and I only click it when I don’t actually give a shit about the correctness of something. It’s great for throwaway factoids that you’re curious about in the moment but won’t remember or care about an hour later lol. Often saves me from wasting time going down a wikipedia rabbithole when I need to be doing something else

      • Steve Dice@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        It’s great for throwaway factoids that you’re curious about in the moment but won’t remember or care about an hour later

        Not even the greatest Sci-Fi writers of, this, and all future times could ever hope to conceive an idea of an intelligence, not of human origin, that would be able to answer such riveting questions as “what’s the name of that guy in that movie?”. Cutie, eat your positronic heart out.

      • idogoodjob@lemmy.world
        15·
        1 day ago

        DDG at least has a setting to disable it and I believe a separate URL if you don’t wanna use an account or cookies to save the setting

  • timestatic@feddit.orgEnglish
    16·
    1 day ago

    Thats honestly why I use Qwant. They’re from europe (France) and even tho they still rely on Bing they are working with Ecosia to build their own independent european search index

      • timestatic@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        Ecosia does still rely on Bing, and will for a while. But they are building their own search index and started rolling it out for more and more search queries and languages last year.

  • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
    15·
    2 days ago

    I use Ecosia. There’s just a regular setting to turn the AI thing off. It’s like 1 of 5 settings they have in total.

  • wander1236@sh.itjust.works
    64·
    2 days ago

    Google’s been getting worse, but it’s not like Bing has been getting better. Maybe it’s just the way I search for things, but I can never get Bing to work.

    • criss_cross@lemmy.world
      26·
      2 days ago

      The problem is you have so many SEO slip makers gaming the algorithm that no one can keep up.

      And most of the decent content is gated behind walled gardens now.

    • CuriousRefugee@discuss.tchncs.de
      13·
      2 days ago

      I use DDG, which works for about 90% of my searches, but when it doesn’t work, I go back to Google, often in a private window. I do agree that Google is still just, I dunno, better?

      • [object Object]@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 days ago

        Idk what I’m doing wrong, but any time I can’t find something in DDG and turn to Google, I get exact same results.

        Exceptions are:

        • localized search (obviously), however I don’t use that in Google either and just do ‘searchterm cityname’ or use the local map service instead.

        • searching on Reddit: Google has an agreement with Reddit for vacuuming all new content immediately.

        • looking for a meme image by its description or caption. This definitely works in Google and pretty much doesn’t in Bing/DDG.

      • Damage@feddit.it
        1·
        1 day ago

        When I used DDG, the !g bang to search on Google became wired in my brain to “get me better results, please”, so much that I sometimes tried using it in Google search too.

  • new_guy@lemmy.world
    31·
    2 days ago

    I use DDG just because they have !bangs and it saves me so much time.

    !yt <keyword> searches YouTube !imdb <keyword> searches IMDb

    And so on.

    • Alaknár@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I just have that in my browser. If I type y search term I get a YouTube Search page for “search term”.

      • TheNamlessGuy@lemmy.world
        2·
        15 hours ago

        The downside is that you MUST type "y " first in that case, whereas the bangs can be placed anywhere, and don’t even require a preceeding space when putting it last

    • kender242@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      If bangs are used for positive searching how do I search for things without the name. I thought !youtube filters out YouTube.

    • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      you can do this with most other search engines i think by prefixing your search with the domain name or name of the website

    • rtxn@lemmy.world
      71·
      2 days ago

      DDG gets its results from other search engines. Bing is one of them.

      There was also a big thing about DDG allegedly selling user data to Microsoft, which the living brain donors of 4chan probably interpreted as DDG being a different front-end to Bing.

      • Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        29·
        2 days ago

        It wasn’t exactly selling, but it also wasn’t alleged. They made an exception for Microsoft’s tracking scripts in their tracking script blocking settings on their phone apps and extensions in exchange for utilizing bing as a backend. Here is the blog post where they walked it back after backlash.

      • DahGangalang@infosec.pub
        1·
        1 day ago

        I have heard about them selling search data to bing. While concerning, I don’t think that’s quite the same thing. I get how 4Chan could blow that out of proportion.

    • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      16·
      2 days ago

      There are really only two usable search engines actually indexing the entire Internet: Google and Bing. Yandex also does but I’ve never seen it recommended for anything other than Russian language content (the company itself seems to be falling down a mineshaft at the moment). Baidu also does some although every Chinese exchange student I talked to about it (admittedly not many) advised only using it when Google is blocked. Every other engine is just wrapping Google or Bing (yes that includes Yahoo and DDG)

      This is the kind of ugly truth of the search engine business. It’s a duopoly at least in part because the indicies are expensive to scrape, build, and run. You need to continuously run a large number of servers loading web pages and often running scripts. You need to be large enough to negotiate with content providers not to block you. Keep in mind paying them may bankrupt you as your margins will be thin. Google has a huge advantage here they own a good chunk of the online advertising industry and can afford to throw money around in a way a search only company wouldn’t be able to (this is why the European and Canadian link tax schemes ironically cement the existing monopolies). You need to continuously run large linear aglebra transforms on the results (PageRank is expensive). You need to store all your indicies on large expensive servers with a lot of memory as hitting disk may take too long. Results need to be fast and you will make next to nothing on each search.

      • DahGangalang@infosec.pub
        1·
        1 day ago

        Can you link any sources on this?

        I think that’s my big hesitance to believe it, there just doesn’t seem evidence (besides other commenter mentioning an anecdotal tank man reference).

        • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          23 hours ago

          In the wikipedia article:

          DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.[69][7][70][71][72] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.[71][73] During a Bing API outage in 2024, DuckDuckGo stopped showing results, indicating that Bing provided a substantial portion of DuckDuckGo’s results.[74][75]

    • excess0680@lemmy.world
      16·
      2 days ago

      Nobody else has mentioned this but there have been several times that Bing censored something and it propagated to DDG, most notably when Microsoft censored Tank Man (intended for China, probably) but then Tank Man also was censored on DDG.

      Partly because of these incidents, I could never consider DDG reliable.

    • Unleaded8163@fedia.io
      24·
      2 days ago

      My understanding is that they outsource the search part to bing’s search back-end. Saying DDG is just Bing is like saying two butchers are the same because they get their meat from the same supplier.

        • Unleaded8163@fedia.io
          3·
          20 hours ago

          It looks like Bing is just a part of the answer: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources

          Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.

      • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
        11·
        2 days ago

        With all due respect, I don’t know enough about butchering but it sounds far less complicated than what we’re talking about

    • steeznson@lemmy.world
      1·
      23 hours ago

      just Bing it bro!

      for real though if you ever want to watch a movie for free online it is by far the best for finding copywrited material (due to not filtering it out and letting you search for videos > 20 mins in length)

    • Staden_ スタデン@pawb.socialEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      On DuckDuckGo there’s this weird phenomena where if my query includes words that are even slightly related to porn themes all my results will be porn. Does this happen on Bing as well?