DDG is great, but as the other commenter said, it uses Bing mostly as its underlying search engine, which might not get you the results you're looking for (it's better at some things than Google, worse at others). For privacy though, DDG is great so I use it as my first-line search and then go to Google if I really need to.
DDG is a search aggregator, and uses a bunch of different engines behind the scenes. One of them is Bing. They provide a list of the engines they use.
Personally, I find DDG gives me the best results of all the engines I've tried, including Google. But plenty of other people have different experiences. My hypothesis is that it depends on what you're searching for and how you write the search query.
DDG is essentially Bing made more private, with a little Yandex. I use it, because I like the privacy, but I don't think they deserve the credit for search result quality.
Part of the pitch for using DDG is that you can easily query Google or Google images (!g !gi etc) or tons of other search engines or just use the regular bing search for basic stuff
It’s more of a privacy friendly search platform than a total replacement for Google
I don't get why people recommend DDG. It's mostly a different skin on bing search results. Why is relying on bing better than relying on google? If DDG had its own engine, I could see the "they're the small underdog focused solely on this" angle, but as-is, you have the choice of Microsoft or Google.
I don't think DDG is quite as simple as a wrapper on Bing, just open both in private windows. Same search => different results.
The reason to use DDG isn't that its results are superior to Google/Bing (although imo this is true in many cases), the reason to use DDG is that its so clean. Google and Bing just feel spammy/garish in comparison
I've tried switching to DDG a few times but since so many other things are integrated into Google/Bing it never sticks.
Have the search results been gamed like they have on Google? That's my fear of DDG getting too big. Google is next to useless for so many searches that just return result after result of useless sites who have farmed questions/answers from other sites.
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