Google search has gotten a lot worse for me now that I use it as a backup for DDG. There's some categories it still does well, but other things are like DDG doesn't find it, but neither will Google. I'm not sure how much of that is Google going downhill (which was a trend before I switched), and how much is the loss of personalization data.

I've also noticed google has developed an extreme recency bias in search results. If you're searching for a term that is somehow related even tangentially to any hot or trending topic over the past year, it is virtually impossible to find relevant, yet dated sources on that topic. I know I can do the timeline filter and all that, but sometimes it's not obvious what window of time you should be searching, etc.

Same boat here. More often than not DDG has substantially more useful results than Google does.

Sometimes Google is better though, especially when I'm looking for something specific (an article I know I read or a video I know I watched, etc)

Interesting, maybe for english speaking only. At least in my experience google has better results and I'm forced to !g often.

Heh, I don't even know how google feels, much like I don't know how ransomware and heroin feels. We don't really have to try everything in life, do we?

Hygiene is important for me on its own, unrelated to other people.

I have the same experience. I started to notice about 6 months ago. It's happening a lot more often that i'm frustrated with results even when looking for trivial stuff. My last search frustration was: 'bitmitigate'. I had to make a benchmark of CDN services and their company site isn't on the first page like other products i'm searching for. I suspect it's because this company had business with alt-right imageboards, but it scares the shit of me if this kind of political controversies are incorporated now in google's algorythm.

By contrast, searching 'bitmitigate' on DDG produces the expected outcome: the first result is the official .com site of the company.

(Edit: added the last paragraph comparing to duckduckgo)

>My last search frustration was: 'bitmitigate'. I had to make a benchmark of CDN services and their company site isn't on the first page like other products i'm searching for.

Seems to be working for me? SERP for me (not private browsing, but I'm not signed in and regularly clear cookies)

1. BitMitigate - CDN, WAF, DDoS Protection, Load Balancing, VPN <--- this is the main site, as expected.

2. BitMitigate: What we know about 8chan's new web protection ...

3. BitMitigate (@bitmitigate) | Twitter

4. Epik reverses course, says BitMitigate will not support 8chan ...

5. BitMitigate becomes new security provider for 8chan ...

Odd. I put that in and got their Twitter, a Google "card" for the company, and then their site.

And articles pointing out that they serve Daily Stormer and 8chan.

Google doesn't have any data on me and googling for local things works just fine if I put e.g. "plumber <my zip code>"

Tbh I don’t really generically search that much. I search within specific sites (e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube) but my first reach out for tool is rarely if ever generic web search. Lots of bangs on ddg