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
it’s OK to me btw, no problem at all. duckassist is nice also idk what are u sayin
I’m seeing way more ads at the top(at the top 5 of the search) related to the keyword I’m typing. For eg, if I am searching for a movie pirate website I would get ad results at the top which are paid like Netflix, Amazon Prime etc and no results related to the pirate site I’m searching. This is not how it used to be. I used to find those sites at the top 3 resuls. It was convenient.
Yes duck assist is great and I like Duck ai as well.
just change search results to be located in Greece and you won’t have any ads
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.
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.
Use searx next time instead of Google.
Yeah I’ve experienced it too and switched to startpage.
DDG is a proxy for bing. If bing is getting worse, that’s why.
Also you fucking kids and your “piracy”. As if you are some kind of independent trailblazer on an adventure to take what you want. Bullshit. You are a bunch of punks violating copyright. But more importantly, you are a consumer of the same swill of the masses that you would claim to be independent of. The only difference is you don’t pay for it. You aren’t free. You are just as shackled as the rest of them.
I gladly accept my downvotes.
Fuck copyright
What a trash take. Piracy has existed forever, why’re you acting like you’re mature and know better than OP? Nothing immoral about piracy is this age. People can’t pirate what they want to watch? It has to be some extremely grassroots local film only?
I’m conflicted on which Simpsons meme to post. Either the “Old man yells at cloud”, or the “No, it’s the children who are wrong”
Here we can see the typical delusional lemmy user
I’m gonna download more copyrighted media today just because you told me not to.
Yes they have. I typically use it to find pages I go to on a regular basis without ‘bookmarking’. Used to find them as a first result so much that all I had to do was let the search load and hit the top link. No more. Now there are anywhere between 2 to 5 links above mine on load only passively related.
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.
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.
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.
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.
websearch enshittification hits me extra hard because I was always bad at searching. please keep me in your thoughts.
TIL I learned DDG is bing and it’s like being diagnosed with cancer.
Correct; there are many such cases, this map shows a bundle of bing proxies
Which search engine is good to find pirate sites and other general websites
Yandex is best for this
They don’t show up there for obvious reasons. Also sites disappear frequently, or move to new domains. You have to use alternative ways, bookmark megathreads and other collections where some other people frequently update the links, something for start:
- On lemmy: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com read the sidebar
- https://wiki.dbzer0.com/piracy/megathread/
- On github: https://github.com/Shakil-Shahadat/awesome-piracy
- Some good links are here as well: https://fmhy.net/
I probably wouldn’t use it as a main search engine because I don’t know how trustworthy it is, but whenever I can’t find some obscure piece of media or something I’ve had amazing results from Yandex
The search engine built into qbittorrent is good as well.
DDG’s results have always been bad in my experience. Unless I’m searching for the most basic, general stuff, more often than not I find more irrelevant results than relevant ones (if I find any relevant ones at all.)
Not to say that Google is much better. I’ve noticed a steady decline in relevance over the past 15 years.
These days if I want an actual answer to something, I still have to add site:reddit.com to my queries. That or ask an AI and hope it’s not hallucinating some bullshit. It may be full of shit, but at least AI understands what I’m looking for.
I also noticed a change. From one day to the next I suddenly got lots of reddit links in the top results
Yep, use to recommend it but it’s just got generic even when filters are set to off, also the ai shit is annoying tho I respect them for not shoving it down my throat. I guess I’ll just wait for ladybug search engine to drop. PS: if anyone’s looking to compile I’ll save you the trouble cause for now it’s only a webview in an app. You could go to DDG or google to search but it’s not a nice experience
Ladybird looks cool. It’s the first ever newsletter I have ever knowingly signed up for.
Too bad it’s expected for 2026
duck duck go is showes Bing results. maybe Microsoft is doing somthing.
