Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
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DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
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Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.
This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:
“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”
I actually stopped using google search all together last night, I was searching for something and the result where just abysmal and mostly irrelevant, I searched on DuckDuckGo and found much better results. I was using both, Google used to be so good and now it’s just a mess.
My biggest pain point with Duck is that the minus operator doesn’t seem to do anything. Have to use Startpage (
!s) when in need of excluding a word.Double quotes also didn’t work to apply explicit phrase searches last time I tried, which is incredibly annoying. Last I heard they were looking into fixing this though
The bigggest beauty point of it is that you can click on adverts knowing that you’re sending money to Duck instead of evilCorp.
Also why, even if you know you’re going to have to go to Amazon for something, you should search for it in your less evil search engine of choice so that Amazon are forced to pay them for the referral. A small way to assuage the guilt, but a goodun.
My default has been Duck Duck Go for a few years now, originally on privacy and fuck-google grounds. I used to have to (reluctantly) stick !g in the search quite a lot when it couldn’t find what I wanted. Hardly ever need to now.