I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few months now and to be honest I’m kind of disappointed. I really appreciate the privacy concerns and the lack of tracking software. It got really annoying how Google would “recommend” things that it thought I was interested in when I wasn’t interested in them, that kind of thing. But on the other hand, I’ve been starting to get really frustrated at just how hard it is to search for anything. You have to be really specific, especially if it’s something niche or if you don’t fully know the right terms to ask for. At least with Google, if you weren’t completely correct about a topic, it could at least parse what hobby or activity you were trying to ask about and bring up things related to that. But with DDG, I’ve found it doesn’t even really try in that regard. Plus it’s frankly really dumb how it uses Apple Maps as opposed to, I dunno? OSM? I honestly prefer Google Maps despite my dislike of the search engine so the usage of Apple Maps is really offputting.

Now, before you say anything, going in I knew it wouldn’t be as easy to search for things as on Google, but I’m pretty experienced with the internet and I didn’t think it would be a problem. But even being hyper-specific yields surprisingly little results if it’s something niche. Even wording it like you would on a University library search engine doesn’t seem to work as good as I might expect.

I’m open to considering more mainstream options too like Bing if it’s better than I remember it being.