I finally gave up and switched back to Google. For the longest time I’ve used Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. Even though it’s essentially a reskinned Bing, I’ve preferred the better privacy and simplicity. It seems like Google over time has continued to de-emphasize the actual search results (the mythical 10 blue links) in favor of creating a multimedia dashboard. Instead of showing me articles or resources, Google seems more interested in cramming as many AI summaries, “People also ask”, and videos into the search results as possible. It felt like Google search had changed its purpose from a search engine to find primary sources, to trying to keep you on the Google search page by showing you extracts and summaries of the primary sources so you never have to click a link.

So, I kept Duck Duck Go and was happy with it.

It started slowly, but over time I saw a slow degradation of the search results. It felt like SEO AI slop was slowly becoming more and more common. Certain classes of searches became useless on Duck Duck Go. An example is searching for machine learning models. When I would Google the name of a new–somewhat niche–open source model, the real model’s GitHub or Huggingface repo wouldn’t even be on the first page. Instead there would be pages of newly registered domains for the same name with AI generated summaries of what the new AI model did. For a few classes of searches I would instead switch over to Google occasionally.

The next nail in the coffin was Reddit. Like it or not, there is a huge amount of technical discussion and debugging that happens on the site. Reddit signed a exclusive deal with Google to give Google exclusive rights to their content for search engine indexing. I didn’t notice much at first, but over time as new Reddit posts weren’t added to the Bing index and shown in Duck Duck Go, the results began to degrade.

Finally, it got bad enough that I made the switch. I created a bunch of custom rules in uBlock Origin that mostly do a good job of cleaning up the Google search results to give me the 10 blue links.

The two biggest improvements I’ve noticed from the switch are the quality of the results and the speed. Google search is just much faster than Duck Duck Go.

I feel a little icky using Google search knowing how much data I’m giving them. But at the end of the day there’s a reason Google still has the most popular search engine: they have good results.

I’m now slightly unhappily using Google and checking back in on Kagi every few months to consider making the switch. Hopefully they’ll reach feature parity with Google soon and I can use them instead.