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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Here's one I searched for just today: "helium" "futures"

DDG returns 2 results.[1] Google returns 369,000.[2]

Here's another one: "opec" "rebalancing" "peak"

DDG returns 0 results.[3] Google returns 319,000.[4]

There have been many, many others. I can email you them as I run in to them, if you want. Just let me know what email address to use.

Also, just to clarify, I noticed the change maybe 3 or 4 months (not weeks) ago.

[1] - https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q="helium"%20"futures"&kd=-1

[2] - https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22helium%22%20%...

[3] - https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q="opec"%20"rebalancing"%20"pea...

[4] - https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22opec%22%20%22...

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Just be aware that Google's "hits" number is a wild overestimate. For example, the "helium" "futures" search actually only returns 222 pages (which is obviously still much higher than DDG): https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22helium%22%20%.... Likewise, the "opec" "rebalancing" "peak" returns only 264: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22opec%22%20%22...

I guess the problem only occurs with the lite version? At least for me, removing the /lite/ part in the URL results in far more results.

Thanks, these are helpful. Is it mostly searches with quoted words?

brian@duckduckgo.com

Yeah, I use quotes a lot because otherwise I find the results are pretty poor (ie. they seem to be more likely to miss at least one of the terms I searched for, and if I'm searching for a phrase then an unquoted phrase could have its words scattered all over the place rather than be treated as a phrase).

This was in fact an issue with queries containing quotes on our /lite and /html sites. It should be fixed now. Let me know if you see any other issues.

What happened is we frequently get hit by bots trying to scrape the links from our /lite and /html sites and we have to react by creating rules to try to block them. This particular rule, was over-aggressive. Our ops team is going to discuss internally how to prevent something like this from happening again.

Thanks!

Thank you. I appreciate you responding personally, taking this seriously, and providing a quick fix.

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