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DDG seems to still function nicely. And I've never stopped using bookmarks. Didn't know people weren't using bookmarks anymore... I mean, what do you? Search for the same website you frequently use or just make a button that can do it in one click?
DDG is complete dogshit. It's my primary search engine and it drives me mad with how useless it is. It was pretty bad but it's gotten way way worse over the past couple of months I feel.
And yeah until a couple of days ago I hadn't bookmarked anything for 13 years. I just keep tabs open, remember names of sites or search the web. But I think I'll start bookmarking again in some cases, but bookmarks suck ever since Delicious disappeared.
DuckDuck Go took getting used to for me due to it lacking all the convenient algorithms from Google that... used to in the past... contribute to getting better search results.
The lack of these conveniences is why I switched to DDG years ago in the first place. I realised Google was essentially helping everyone build their own Internet echo chambers and I didn't want to be part of that.
It does mean you actually need to be good at searching for what you want because DDG is very bad at "guessing".
Or to put it differently; I call you complaints skill issues. :)
You may call it as you wish. And in some way you might be right. But I've been searching the web since the 90's, from AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Google to DDG. I use operators in my queries etc. I'm not new to this. One thing that drives me mad with DDG is that it translates search terms, even if they're in quotes, and gives me results with the translated terms mixed in with the original term. That is never ever what I want. It really likes to decide for me what I want I feel like, like when I searched for screenshots of the software for a particular surveillance camera, DDG showed me nothing but product images of said camera. I tried several different queries, only got product photos. Tried Google and immediately got a whole bunch of screenshots, which DDG should have known given the term screenshot and other synonyms, in quotes.
SearXNG is better in some ways. It's a more literal search and doesn't try to guess what you're thinking as much as Google or DDG.
From my personal experience it became worse in the past few years. Sometimes I couldn't find something only to find it with one search request in google or yandex /:
Ddg is great for the US, but shit outside.
I live in Denmark. I can't complain.