I just provisionally switched my default search engine over from Google to DuckDuckGo.
I considered and rejected this a few years ago. But that was a few years ago. What changed?
Three things:
1. SEARCH QUALITY DEGRADATION
It •used• to be that if what I was searching for was on the web at all, it was almost always the first or second thing Google showed. Now that link is buried under heaps of unhelpful widgets and doodads and AI-extracted snippets and mile upon mile of content farm garbage results.
Google Search’s main appeal was search quality. That advantage is gone. If I’m going to have to scroll anyway, might as well protect my privacy.
@inthehands My middle-school daughter recently switched for this first reason alone. She would come to me asking homework questions, saying she'd searched and searched, and I would search and find answers. Because she was using Google on her school-supplied Chromebook, while I was using Duck Duck Go on my personal computer. She said DDG is clearly giving better results, and figured out how to switch the default on her Chromebook.
