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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

I want to use DDG. I've made it my default search engine. But the result page is just so slow. Both in slow to load (v Google), and actual responsiveness. It's just slightly laggy, or at least it feels like that. Google has neither problem. I'm willing to put up with not-excellent relevancy, but the slowness is killing me.

I'm using FF 49 64-bit on Win8. Am I anomalous or does anyone else feel this at all?

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No slowness here.

The only downside is the quality of results.

Most of the time when searaching technical questions I get better results on google compared to ddg.

It looks like ddg doesn't like stackoverflow.

Agreed: underranking SO is my biggest issue with DDG.

Which of course depending on their ranking implementation seems kinda odd, as you could expect a big part of the users of SO also to be the ones using DDG. But again if it categorically undervalues results from there, then those users will of course find alternatives.

This is what I've noticed as well. Searching for Rust programming questions is very hard with DDG, whereas Google gets relevant results at the top. Otherwise, DDG and Google are pretty much on par.

Might be the query then, I usually get the proper SO result as one of the first 3 matches. Anyway if you're getting results that are really off, hit the 'Send feedback' button. A DDG employee here on HN claimed they use this actively to make results better - hard to teel if that is so, of course.

I generally have no problems with it. I've tried FF/Chrome on Win8/10 and Arch. The load time might be marginally slower than google but the UI is fine.

I haven't noticed but I wonder if the complexity of making the infinite results pop into the page as you scroll is causing the difference. For me this feature alone is worth a mild slowdown in responsiveness. On Google you gave to click to get to results >10.

You're not anomalous. I'm not usually using DDG, but checked it out on chrome 51 64-bit on Win10, compared with google and there is definitely noticeable lag on DDG in many areas, though NOT to the extent of making page unusable.

I've noticed that DDG is maybe twice as slow as Google (still damn fast), and much faster than the links returned in the results. That said, I have recently noticed that occasionally, no results load at all, and I F5-it.

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