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Comment by exergy | Hacker News Reader

Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless.

That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I believe with Google. It's Google's search results, minus the tracking. It's as much as I am willing to compromise on something as fundamental as search.

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The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well.

At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).

For example, "new double c++" is the query I did most recently and in the top 3 there are 2 results that answer my question.

Making something up at random like "torrent clients" gives me as top hit the Wikipedia article "comparison of bittorrent clients", which is better than expected.

I can't seem to think of a vague query right now. "audio books" gives me sites with audio books; "psychology books" gives me articles of 'the best 50 psychology books' and such; and looking in my query history, "draw unicode" seems vague but the top hit (shapecatcher.com) is the one I was looking for.

Something localized then: "drankwinkel echt" (where Echt is a place and drankwinkel a liquor store) indeed gives terrible results. The store name, surprisingly, works though: "gal & gal echt" gives similar results to google.nl.

> At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).

Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be Google's undoing.

Still, Google is miles ahead of the competition.

Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.

On Bing there is a first line of 4 videos, none of them related to the movie "Up" in any way. The second link is to Up on Imdb (good). The 3rd link is to a crazy religious fanatic site page titled "Disney PIXAR's, 'Up' - The Sugarcoating of Pedophilia!" (WTF??!? - but at least related to the movie). The 4th link is again to a youtube video with no connection to the movie.

On Google, the first 8 links are to the movie. There is a line of images, all from the movie / movie poster. There's a list of 4 questions "People also ask" that shows questions about the movie ("How many balloons would it take to lift a house?"). To be fair, the crazy Baptist site does show up on Google too (God has good SEO!), but way down below the fold.

Anyway, my point is, when answering the question, Google is certain you're looking for information about Up, and tries to give it to you.

Bing seems to have doubts and tries to guess if maybe you're looking for a funny video of a man in the subway wearing a balloon hat (??!? it's not a "movie"!!) or the hit song "99 Luftballons" from 1983 (not a "movie" either!)

Bing tries hard, but is obviously more than a little clueless.

>crazy religious fanatic site

FYI, Landover Baptist Church (which that article is from) is a very old, very well known spoof site.

Oh, thank you, I didn't know that. It seems real enough.

And a canonical example of Poe’s Law in action.

Yes. But the fact that it's a parody of fundamentalist Christianity makes it a very bad result, because it's a comment on religion (or fanaticism, or Internet culture, or what have you) and not about the movie itself.

A perfect search engine would not return this on the first page of results about the movie, because it's not about the movie.

> Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.

Your experiment's results are not repeatable. When I do that here:

* Bing gives me 8 pages about Up (including that spoof site), one about Danny Deckchair, and a page about a magician who re-creates old movies with balloons.

* Google gives me 13 pages about Up (also including that spoof site), a book of best movie scenes on its page for The Third Man, and an article from The Rotarian from 1948.

Of course, some knowledge of how these things work teaches that this is a terrible methodology, given that it does not account for the fact that both Bing and Google tailor their search results to the searcher. One should at the very minimum log out of one's Google and Bing accounts, which you made no mention of doing.

> The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible... But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well.

That's a spot-on description of Altavista :)

DDG "worse" search results are also a product of you not being profiled. Or to put it in another way, Google better search results are also a product of all your habits being gathered and analyzed. Sadly we can't have a search engine that knows nothing about us and guesses at the same time what we are looking for. DDG can give better results, but this require being more specific when searching.

I'm not sure this is true. Google results are still amazing when used at a friends' or a public computer and not logged in, etc. (not to mention incognito mode, which you could argue still profiles you through your ip).

Other search engines feel like a noob salesperson who needs to be told 5 times in 5 different ways what you need -- and it's really simple stuff too.

I like experienced salespeople.

Google results get "better" (depending on your definition of better) as you go in very specific ways. When I browse I clear cookies every time a tab is closed and I never log into Google just for searching. I've noticed at work I'll be googling for programing stuff and if my session gets "stale" (been doing a bunch of searches without closing the tab) I notice Google starts making assumptions about what I want. For example, if I Google a generic programming term say "string," on a stale session Google will assume the string I want is programming rather than, say, crafting or physics, and the string I want is the language I've been Googling in my last few search terms. So if I googled "string" in a fresh session I get a couple generic Wikipedia pages and some references from various programming language. If I Google "string" in a stale session Google "knows" I'm looking for the Java string so they will show me Java string results. If I wanted those same results I'd have to Google "Java string." It does make you lazy at searching though because you start thinking "Google knows what I'm talking about."

DDG could still profile you via an account and just not sell the info to advertisers. Incorporate in Germany for the strong privacy protections, et voila :)

In my experience, DuckDuckGo just requires a habit shift. You're used to Google knowing everything about you and utilizing that to provide you catered results. Be more specific on DDG and you should be fine.

This was my feeling as well. Try using Google from a public library and it returns results similar to DDG.

Not at all. I'm not logged in to my Google account at my day job and I still got relevant search results when I arrived. DDG wouldn't after months of use at home.

You don't need Google account to be profiled by them.

How else can they profile me in a brand new job, in a brand new Windows installation, in Firefox, if I'm not logged in? The organization I work for has a lot of different job types and we're all proxied through the same external IP so they couldn't even profile my job type.

I got relevant results in my first day there. I didn't notice a drop in result quality.

Google is just that good even if I hate to admit it.

There's still a limited number of job types at your workplace. If you search for "django" odds are none of your non-technical colleagues have been searching for anything other than the Python framework at work.

Fair enough.

It has greatly improved over the years. I remember it being unusably bad when I first tried it in 2013, but today I only have to revert to Google once in a while. That being said, there are rare occasions when it fails spectacularly, bringing up totally irrelevant results for simple searches.

It seems to expect more precise queries, while Google is geared toward "close enough" searches. I've found that DDG is often preferable when I have an exact phrase in mind. Google is sometimes too helpful, correcting errors that are not actually errors and failing to take some queries literally enough.

The main issues I have with DDG are that it doesn't seem to prioritize recent results (which can be good, but usually isn't) and it fails at local results, which is basically by design.

DDG feels like it's still using Google's early algorithms, whereas Google has moved to prioritising more question or natural-language based searches recently.

>Google is sometimes too helpful, correcting errors that are not actually errors and failing to take some queries literally enough.

While I am still personally a huge fan of Google's work in this are and many others, sometimes I long for the days of straight boolean search queries in search engines. I could often find exactly what I'm looking for, and get the same result each time.

Are there any other major or effective engines that allow for boolean queries beyond AND/OR?

A full set boolean queries, while useful for specifying a query, are likely far too computationally expensive at scale. The reason you don't see most major search engines abandon them is because the resources are better spent investing into heuristic algorithms that benefit a majority of the userbase.

I just saw this now. Thanks, that makes sense. Just the same, I still miss the utility of it!

You use DDG as your default engine. For most common searches it works fine, particularly nice is that if there is a wikipedia entry it will show it right there. When you have a tougher search and it doesn't work you just slap a '!g' or a '!b' on the end and turn it into a google/bing search.

Maybe you're searching for something really niche, but I use DDG and have no problem with its results. If I can't find what I'm looking for, I can always use !g to check google, and most of the time google doesn't have the answer either!

Scary to think that there is only a single website that provides good "something as fundamental as search"!

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