In the recent months I started getting dissatisfied with Google the company in general, but also with its search engine due to privacy reasons, and SEO bloat affecting certain searches. A few weeks ago I switched to Duckduckgo from Google. Some searches are fine but there are three main issues I've been experiencing with Duckduckgo since the switch.

• The search "fails" and shows me results that are tangentially related to the query. Happens quite often and for various topics.
• It shows me a semi-related search results instead of the one I searched for, because it says there are not enough results for my query. Then I have to click again on the small text to search for the actual query.
• The automatic prompts that complete your query are scarce and unsatisfactory.

Because of this I've been switching back and forth between Google and Duckduckgo lately. I don't want to use Google, but Duckduckgo is definitely the worse option in general in my experience. It's better in some searches and shows useful results instead of big site bloat, but my overall experience was one of getting heavily downgraded.

This led me to a criticism about the discussions around this topic. People talk a lot about SEO bloat affecting search results, and it's definitely a real issue. It's especially a problem for some political searches, as it results in you getting propaganda results. However, recommending people Duckduckgo without mentioning its significantly worse search quality seems misleading.

I am of course not against using or recommending Duckduckgo. In fact, I wish them greater success in market share and development, as I think their policies are much better. But I think mentioning Duckduckgo's downsides is important to adequately inform people. I expected a noticeable downgrade, but I didn't expect it to be this worse because nobody mentioned it. As a result, I felt misled, and I definitely didn't know what I was getting into. Being adequately informed would have prevented that, as I would adjust my expectations.

So, this seems to be largely unaddressed in discussions around this topic, and I suspect the echo chamber effect around anti-Google discourse and privacy issues might be to blame.

What are your thoughts? Has anyone experienced something similar?

Over the last week or so, I have been noticing that the majority of my searches in DuckDuckGo have been completely failing. For example, I was searching for a specific Firefox extension api and it only brings up a list of Firefox extension. If I put the exact same query into Google, the second result is exactly what I wanted. Before this last week, I have being using DDG almost exclusively, but know I am need to add the Google bang before nearly every query. Am I the only person that is having this experience? I really prefer using DDG to Google, but I can't if the results stay this way.