I used DDG for a while, but DDG's quality fell precipitously a few years ago (similar issues where it ignores quotes and won't find pages even if you search for the title string exactly, etc) and I eventually came back to Google which has also been increasingly frustrating.
> I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
There's no way this won't get abused, but the SEO stuff is out of control. Not even spammer blogs, but if you have a quick question like "how do I check tire pressure" you will only get articles that start with a treatise on the entire history of car tires and the answer is deeply buried somewhere in the article. My guess is that Google sees that we're on the page for a longer time than we would spend on pages that just return the answer, and they assume that "more time on page" == "better content" or something.
DDG has become ridiculous. They seem to be merging "local", geoIP based results no matter what country I select on the region list (or I disable it). Very often completely unrelated stuff (but local) appears on the 5th or 6th result, midway the first page.
Most egregiously I will search for something very rare (e.g. about programming) and DDG will return me results regarding my city's tourist/visitor info. It's as if it just keeps ignoring words from the search prompt that return no results until it runs out of keywords then it's just the geoIP results.
I hate this forced localization so much and its everywhere. The internet used to be a place where you would actually encounter stuff outside your locale.
That is because DuckDuckGo started relying almost entirely on Bing for their regular search results after first Yahoo gave up maintaining its own index then Yandex became part of a natio non grata leaving them to choose between partnering with Bing and partnering with Google or creating their own index https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
The tire pressure query is exactly the kind of thing that AI should be able to handle easily, though. At which point google has an incentive to sort their competitiveness out.
> I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
There's no way this won't get abused, but the SEO stuff is out of control. Not even spammer blogs, but if you have a quick question like "how do I check tire pressure" you will only get articles that start with a treatise on the entire history of car tires and the answer is deeply buried somewhere in the article. My guess is that Google sees that we're on the page for a longer time than we would spend on pages that just return the answer, and they assume that "more time on page" == "better content" or something.