Google has had terrible search quality as of late. I'm finding myself using DuckDuckGo more and more just to find very basic things that used to be easy with Google. This is just in the last couple months or so.
Not sure if that's the case here, but if it is I wouldn't be surprised.
Google search has gone significantly down in quality over the last year or so. Even just searching for simple things only seems to yield articles from the same 20 or so major websites, and it’s worse if you’re looking for niche items. DuckDuckGo on the other hand is starting to give relatively better and more diverse results these days.
Googles search functionality seems to be getting worse and worse. A lot of the time now, when I try DuckDuckGo it surfaces what I’m looking for in instances where Google just gives me a lot of irrelevant links.
Is it just my imagination (or sample bias) or are other people experiencing the same thing?
I don't know why but google results became mediocre/bad recently. There were a time when I could pick [good] google results in a blind test (for programming topics) between several search engines (Bing, Yandex). Now, DuckDuckGo can return noticeably better results for some queries than Google.
I've been avoiding Google for a while. Its search results have become significantly less quality than DuckDuckGo -- which I hear is a rebranded Bing anyway.
I still regularly make searches in duckduckgo (which gets results from Bing) and then find that I have to switch Google to actually find what I'm looking for. The worst thing about this is that Google's results don't seem to be as good as they used to be, and there isn't really any other search engine that matches it yet that I've seen.
I'm not so sure about search being fantastic anymore. I'm frustrated with how most times Google will completely ignore the exact query terms and return very clickbaity/popular links from medium/quota/etc. It's been happening for a bit now and usually for any serious search, I'll compare results with duckduckgo just to be sure.
In the beginning I kept going back to Google because the results on duckduckgo just wasn't as good, but it slowly improved, so much that I actually haven't used Google for search for about two years now. Even local searches for my country has become much better on duckduckgo.
And when I have occasionally tested Google to compare results, I also noticed a rapid decline in the relevant results at Google. So much that I can hardly recognize that search engine any longer.
And as a result google search in general has been going downhill for the last 5 years. It's getting so bad, that I've openly been trying other search engines. Unfurtunately, duckduckgo has the same problem. I'm keeping an eye out for other search engines to do most of my searches.
The quality of Google results has dropped substantially in the last week (adding to already poor results). Today I literally couldn't find anything I looked for apart from getting spam and malware dens masqueraded as legitimate sites. DuckDuckGo got me all I needed.
Google has become very much unusable...
I totally agree! Googles search results is starting to suck. If I'm sitting with an errorcode for some sort of program, trying to search it on google, will just give me a couple of random generated botsites.
I have moved permanently to Duckduckgo. :-)
Interestingly, the general perception I've had for a while now is that Google's search results have been getting slowly, gradually worse over the years. It seems like it works harder now to funnel you into some predefined concept of what it thinks you're looking for, rather than returning the data and letting you filter it yourself.
That's great for very common searches, but makes it much harder to find anything that Google doesn't expect (or want) you to look for.
Granted, I've got no data to back that up. I'm probably in the minority of users here, but I pretty sure I'm not the only one.
Nah, most of my searches still start at DuckDuckGo since I haven’t fully gotten back in the habit of putting the search redirection keyword back in yet.
If it’s fine for you for most things, great, but based off very recent and nearly daily data on my end, that is not my experience at all.
I do agree about Google getting worse though. There isn’t a search engine today that can even hold a candle to Google from over 10 years ago including Google itself. Unfortunately, the closest thing is still Google.
I felt really weird the day I realized I don't use Google to "google" anymore.
I use DuckDuckGo, when it fails I'll fall back to Google, but even then it's getting to be pretty useless compared to how it was.
For example, I recently wanted to find a reference for an obscure quote that included the word "squaring" but all the search results from Google were for "square". So frustrating.
It's not just you. The quality of Google search results has been declining for a long time. It reached the point of being no better than alternatives a while back for me. These days, it's worse than several of them.
I wonder if this is related to the fact the quality of Google's search results has seriously declined for me over the years. I keep getting the feeling that Google is trying to second-guess what I'm looking for, and not only getting it wrong, but getting it more and more wrong as time goes by.
Even Google search is going downhill. Most searches contain a lot of sponsored crap at the top. And it's often returning worse results than duckduckgo.
I too feel google results gave been getting worse in the past 6 years. It's hard to describe, but it feels like the internet is somehow getting smaller.
But duck duck go results are still noticeably worse, sadly.
Not sure if that's the case here, but if it is I wouldn't be surprised.
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