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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

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sametmax

Search a place in google: you get time table, phone numbers, a map to go and if it's opened right now.

Search anything in another language than english, and it works.

Search something in a very specific area of expertise that is not computing, and google will find it.

Search for something with a very weird, contextual explanation with terrible typos, still works.

Ddg, as much as I like it, is very far away from delivering this experience.

I used ddg for a year, but realized I ended up typing !g for most of my queries.

Besides, the HN crowd is very tech saavy, they can do without the Google magic. Most people don't even know what a URL is.

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But google search has gotten lot worse to find reputable information. Eg try find that is sugar bad for you. I at least get tons of sensational click bait articles instead actual reputable information.

I'm getting an infobox summarising https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/eating-too-much-added-su... when searching for [sugar health]. Then, the first result is the decidedly non-hypolically titled "Is Sugar Really Bad for You? It Depends" from The New York Times

Meanwhile, Bing gives me "10 reasons why sugar is bad for you" and "Sweet Poison: Why Sugar is Ruining our Health".

It's not even close.

And this here is exactly why I don't like Google Search. It will return 100 different results for 100 different people all searching for the same string.

Yup.. It giving me this infobox http://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-disturbing-reasons-wh...

The only thing that seems to have worsened is image search, when search by image was first added it was easy to get other copies of an image, now with AI magic it seems to find results in the same category better but not the exact image you're looking for.

It's true that Google search has some fancy features that DDG doesn't have, but I have found that the core search results are very similar. DDG has become a solid search engine with some of its own more specialised fancy features.

Sometimes DDG feels less convoluted. Not just because of Google's excessive ad overload, but also because Google guesses too much for my taste. They think they know me better than I do and that turns out to be incorrect often enough to be annoying.

Where Google does have an unassailable lead is in maps. Their "explore" feature is extremely useful for finding places to eat & drink. Directions are great. Google maps is simply excellent.

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