I’m finding the results are not helpful as they used to be and sometimes way past the topic I’m searching. This is very prevalent when I’m searching for pirate sites. I’m falling back to Searxng whenever this occurs.

Has anyone noticed it too? Has DDG upped their modera

  • ComradeMiao@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I only use searx for this reason. Also, whyre you searching for pirate sites? You should have a handful that you use and seed for.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      Honestly I’m a little worried when the new administration comes in. When the MPAA walks in with a bucket full of money and they decide to Go after torrenting again I don’t really want them to see my complete history and my credit balances. When they catch me on TPB they’re going to only catch me with whatever I’ve got my hand on in the cookie jar.

      • ComradeMiao@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Are you not using a VPN? Also were you using TPB as your main tracker? Try TL for a step up and a private one too.

        • rumba@lemmy.zip
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          3 months ago

          Hell yes on the VPN. I have jacket connecting to a half dozen public services. I have a private one but I tend to only source the things there that I can’t find elsewhere.

  • janonymous@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I also noticed a change. From one day to the next I suddenly got lots of reddit links in the top results

  • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
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    3 months ago

    DuckDuckGo is just a bing proxy. I think Microsoft is working on optimizing it for their copilot thing.

    • Samsy@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      I had the same and just realised that the order of the results got rearranged.

    • MonkeyBusiness@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Maybe it’s a fairness strategy? Rather than show everyone the same list so that only the top 3 get all the clicks, they rotate them to spread the traffic.

  • JustVik@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    In general, I noticed that a significant degradation of search engines began to occur after the appearance of chatGPT, perhaps this is somehow related. Before that, degradation was slower. Maybe in Google for example they were a little afraid that ChatGPT would learn from their search engines and replace them…

        • Found some python code that can act as a openai api proxy. Wrote an ai agent with langchain search tools persistent memory image generators sandboxed code execution environment calculator etc. Use an uncensored llm via openrouters, openai api for vector embedding, locality hosted stable diffusion. Locally hosted searxng. Then i can use any openai api compatable frontend and just point it at my proxy and have an advanced agent in almost any environment.

          Havnt published it yet was thinking i could give it an autogpt or baby agi backend but havnt had any success with that yet.

  • toddestan@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    I’d say their search results have been in decline for some time now, though quality has taken a particularly big hit the past year or so. I’d switch to someone else, but I haven’t found a decent alternative yet. As poor as DDG’s results are, they are still a few rungs above the rubbish Google spits out.

      • LydiaChlamydia@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I’ve always used SearXNG and I love it. The only issue that every once in a while an instance stops working and you have to switch, I imagine this isn’t an issue if you self host though

  • oni ᓚᘏᗢ@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    In my experience, Google has been to me a better tool to find pirate sites but I got poor results about programming topics there, otherwise, with DuckDuckGo I got excellent results for programming topics but poorly results for pirate sites.

  • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    Because it’s just bing under the hood, same as qwant. And Bing/microshaft doesn’t really care that much about you using it for actual search. M$hit wants you to use Copilot. Copilot cannot be fit as easily into meta search engines such as SearxNG. I’m quite convinced that the whole push behind the aggressive AI promotion going hand in hand with search engine experience degradation (ACCELERATED BY THE PROLIFERATION OF SEOMAXXING AI-SLOP ONLINE) is to a large extent driven by the desire to tighten the walled gardens and information control. Millions of idiots convinced that a text generator program is somehow similar to an actual person would more readily accept it providing opinions or censored information, in place of diverse information.

    Congratulations to all of you still happily trading your freedom for convenience. Instead of just a ranking algorithm that nonetheless can show you multiple results at a glance, you get the generation of just one result, at the environmental cost much higher than a regular search, up to 10 times more energy, and sometimes even slower than what would be the time required to load a regular page on a good LTE connection if modern web wasn’t so bloated.

    All while accelerating the march towards digital feudalism. Because even the immense amount of storage space and link capacity required to build your own search index is nothing compared to the cost of training a LLM and then providing it via some SaaSS.

  • wrekone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    Yes, DDG results have seen a major drop in quality in the past 4-6 months. It’s been my primary search engine for several years now but I don’t know if my loyalty can withstand such a drastic decline. Bing results must have taken a nosedive as well, but I don’t use Bing so I can’t compare.

  • ramble81@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Are there any search engine aggregators which can pull the top X sites from multiple locations and display them on a single page?