this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I've always been underwhelmed with DuckDuckGo as a search engine, and for context on that remark I use Bing as my main search engine.
Is bing actually still just bad? Google just pushes stores for search results when I'm just trying to figure out how shit works so I'm so ready to switch permanently.
Not op, but I used it the other day when I got fed up with google bascally only giving me amazon results when I was looking for something, and yeah it was better (admittedly, it was more like how google used to be, which I view as better). I don't really think bing is the solution though, can absolutely see them being enshittified shortly if they get enough people to start using bing.
Funnily enough, bing is actually used as an example in the article where the author explains what enshittification is.
Basically, you’re right. The author said that currently, bing is still unpopular enough that it’s in the stage where they want to attract users. The best way to do that is by actually being a useful, effective search engine. Once bing gets a better reputation and a larger user base, they’ll begin to exploit their users and become enshittified like google has.
Bing is great now, especially with the addition of their GPT based Bing Chat
DDG literally uses Bing's search backend, last I checked.
Honestly I find all search engines to be somewhat unusable in today's day and age. It made me realize how much I relied on reddit keywords when all those results were private, and everything else was AI generated SEO ad farms. Bing seems to be slightly better than everything else, and the convenient occasional access to GPT when everything else is trash is nice to have.
DDG is literally Bing. At least in part. It aggregates results from a handful of places.
Since DDG doesn't do user tracking shit it never learns what you may be searching for when you use a specific term. For example if I search for "Rangers score" it always kicks back a NY Rangers score and not a Texas Rangers score. Why? Popularity.
You have to be a bit more specific than you otherwise would but it works okay. I still fall back to Google when I need to get down to some obscure shit but day to day DDG does it for me.