I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
they’re pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I’m getting actual results.
Yeah DDG is great. The only thing I find is its not good at local results but a quick !g on the end gets me the local results im looking for.
What does !g do? Add Google results?
Redirects your search to Google. You can put it anywhere in the search; for example
!g how do i shot web
,how do i shot web !g
andhow do i !g shot web
will all land you into Google.There are other 13k (yup) bangs like this. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Yahoo, Quora, most gaming wikis, etc. A few sites (like Google and Bing) have multiple bangs, that land you directly into a specific page (e.g. !bv searches Bing videos). More info here.
*how do i shot web
It’s an older meme, but it checks out.
I’ll fix it! I forgot that this is like “an hero”, one of those memes where the error is part of the charm.
If you’re using ddg without !bangs - you’re only having half the fun.
!w Wikipedia
!imdb IMDb
!gi Google images
there’s tons more. if ddg is the default search engine these bangs save you the time to go to the site first and click the search bar. basically changing your default search into a specific search.
oh, good tip. I didn’t know about that.
you tack !g to the end of whatever the resulting search URL is?
Can be anywhere in the search.
“cute dogs !g” “!g cute dogs” “cute !g dogs”
Those all work the same, though clearly one is more cursed than the others. They have those for a bunch of other sites as well, for example if you want to search YouTube specifically/directly you can use !yt but I can’t kick the habit of just going to those sites first and then searching directly on there.
Yes DDG Bangs are a great fast way of getting around the web. Works really well with LibRedirect. Here’s a Full List of DDG Bangs.
That’s how I felt until about a month ago, now ddg is really useless
Holy shit the bangs work at the end of the search query too!? I’ve always painfully pressed Home on my keyboard to add a !g whenever I realise I had better searched this on Google
I prefer DDG, but I hate the news search. 90% of the results are paywalled.
Oh, and sometimes the image search will return a pile of porn for a seemingly clean search request. I once searched for “R34 Skyline” expecting Nissans, and got VERY different results without safe search.
Searching for R34 is on you. Naming something R34 is on Nissan. The popularity of R34 is on all of us.
R34 is also short for rule 34 - “if it exists, there’s porn of it on the internet”
So if you search R34 and anything, you’ll get porn.
Now I want to see some skyline porn
Here you go!
spoiler
Thanks for making me feel inadequate…