I switched back to google after using DDG for about half a year, DDG results are nice, but if you mix searches between different language you need to manually set the country for which you are searching, google does this automatically.
DDG is now even with Google imo. Used to be different for sure. But nowadays, it's a back and forth.
For a lot of people DDG is strictly better: You live anywhere that is not the US and therefore have to deal with a thing called "locality". Sometimes you want search results in language X, sometimes for your location, sometimes you need the "normal" results for Americans.
Google decides all that for you. Badly. There is no setting except - your know, logging into some Google account and finding some setting somewhere for it.
I love DDG but the problem is that google is still the best whenever I want to search something that's not in English or that's localized. So I still use google for that.
For the same reason I find DDG very useful when I don’t want localized results, which is hard to get with Google. I currently live in Spain and Google returns mostly Spanish results, even on unrelated queries like programming or a device review.
I don't know. I am using DDG from outside the U.S. but with English as the primary search language. The Google's localized results are just an order of magnitude better. I end up re-doing almost 10-20% of my searches in Google after being dissapointed with DDG results. Most of the time Google results are sadly superior.
And don't get me even started in searching in my native language (Finnish). DDG is close to useless there, since it can not parse the different, obscure word forms we use (although I type word X in form A, I want my searches to include results in of word X in semantically related forms B and C). Google did not initially parse Finnish very well, but it eventually became amzingly good something like a decade ago.
I'm using DDG for almost a year, and I'd say that DDG is slightly better because I have a bit more control. It's important when you're multilingual (common in Europe) to be able to de-localize results chose language etc.
But it isn't MUCH better. DDG is just slightly better than Google, that has become infuriating.
This is all anecdotal, but something like 90% of my searches are fine in DDG. The rest are for highly specific searches in narrow fields where there just aren't many results at all, or where there's lots of results in another language e.g. Japanese. Google is better at filtering those out.
Have been using DDG for a couple of years. Am satisfied with its english result. One area for improvement would be non-english search results. For me it's non-english results are largely irrelevant, compared to google
One thing that I prefer about DDG is that it doesn't try to guess what language I want to search in other than by my input. It is ridiculous that google forces me to go through worse results based solely on my location, it shouldn't matter where you are from.
I've been using DDG almost exclusively for about a year now. Every once in a while I'll do a google search because I can't find what I'm looking for on DDG. This is usually when I'm looking for something local/in a non-english language, or when I'm doing a search for a long string (say a couple of lines from a song lyric).
One of google's biggest advantages -- for me at least -- is its localized URLs. google.co.uk, google.fr, google.de, ... they all boost results in the local language(s) and in the relevant country. There's a way to make DDG act the same way, of course, but it's much easier to just type google.de.
I'm in the US and DDG is my default because privacy or something but pretty much any remotely complex query, I end up switching to google and get way better results.
That’s also the very reason I switched to ddg: getting non local, non trending results in Google is a PITA. It’s a constant fight against the AI that tries to steer the results towards what 90% of the people in that country are looking for.
Yeah, I've tried switching to other search engines a few times, but one domain where a lot of them really lack is non-English results.
Google has increasingly turned to garbage these past few years. But searching anything non-English on other search engines really feels like randomly populated results.
Location and temporal results are also lacking on non-Google results. Google also over-optimizes for them, so sometimes DDG is nice when Google is for some reason absolutely convinced I'm searching from some random town in another country and is only serving up results for that area.
My biggest problem with DDG is that it is so English-centric. I know they have those "regions", but the results from them are much worse than from US region and a need to switch them via settings page every time I change the search language is an unacceptable hassle.
I never touch the DDG settings, but I often search in about a dozen different languages, and I get great results. The rare times I try to find something in another search engine, including Google, I get worse (or not better at best) results there, even for quite obscure topics, so I guess everything is user-specific.
Polish guy living in Chile, using DDG as a main search for something like 2 years ago now. on the occasion (once every week maybe?) I switch to Google (!g + search) if DDG doesn't give me good result, but with Google recently almost every time I have to switch to verbatim mode as normal one returns garbage...
rest od the searches are rather ok, but I'm mostly searching in English and Spanish. in the latter case I sometimes have to force local results (toggle in the search pageof DDG) as it returns results from different Latin countries.
I did try DDG and Startpage a few years ago but ultimately gave up because the results were not good.
I gave another try to DDG since about 3 weeks and so far the results are pretty good. Not only they got better on the last few years, but for me Google got worse at the same time.
Almost everytime I search in Google nowadays, I have to reformulate my search 2~3 times to get decent results. I often need to add double quotes, ask for reddit or specify the language. Google today just tries too much to read my mind, guess what I want and make interpretations instead of just doing what I asked. Because of this huge waste of time, I became frustrated over time.
Also, I am French, use English very often (including at work) and live in Japan, so the explicit region filter of DDG is really a bless compared to the obscure and almost always wrong way Google handles this.
DDG results have greatly improved over the last year. I tried switching from Google to DDG a couple years ago, but didn't last more than a week. DDG results are as good (and nicer looking) than Google for general searches, but I still rely on Google for needle in a haystack searches.
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