Not sure if it's just me, but there is something quite wrong with #duckduckgo this morning!
Results don't seem to be showing up for even the most basic queries.
Ok #DuckDuckGo -- I am really curious about this one!
I searched for: david sedaris blood work
because I wanted to see if the piece was online anywhere. The result I got on both my phone's Firefox Focus and my work laptop's Firefox says "not many results contain test, search for david sedaris blood 'test'?"
but the word "test" is not anywhere in my query.
Searching for: lab blood work
does not get me this. Nor do other things I've tried.
I know that I am not the first to bring this up, but #DuckDuckGo is getting more useless by the day. I really try hard to not support fascist billionaires where I can, but the % of times I get useless responses from DDG and have to use Google is now close to 80%.
Feature suggestion for #DuckDuckGo or other #search engines: let me downvote results.
There is just so fucking much utter garbage, and the people pushing it have (apparently) effective SEO. Let me click a button saying "never allow this domain in my search results ever again."
Here is one thing that it is happening lately when I search for something in #duckduckgo: Apart from the results linked to my query I am also getting some results(links) from the place where I live. How is this possible? This was not happening before with ##duckduckgo#privacy
@kev I've used ddg in every context on every device for over 12 years... From which they should take no great sense of safety, as I used Google Search for 15 years before dropping it like someone handed me gorilla dung after I learned about how invasive and polluted their search results were.
Sure seems like I need to begin trying other privacy focused search engines if #DuckDuckGo wants to put more into generating AI hype than giving me unfiltered unbubbled untracked search results. @ anyone?
Im as anti-"AI" as the next person, but I think its important to keep in mind the larger strategic picture of "AI" w.r.t. #search when it comes to #DuckDuckGo - both have the problem of inaccurate information, mining the commons, etc. But Google's use of LLMs in search is specifically a bid to cut the rest of the internet out of information retrieval and treat it merely as a source of training data - replacing traditional search with #LLM search. That includes a whole ecosystem of surveillance and enclosure of information systems including assistants, chrome, android, google drive/docs/et al, and other vectors.
DuckDuckGo simply doesnt have the same market position to do that, and their system is set up as just an allegedly privacy preserving proxy. So while I think more new search engines are good and healthy, and LLM search is bad and doesnt work, I think we should keep the bigger picture in mind to avoid being reactionary, and I dont think the mere presence of LLM search is a good reason to stop using it.