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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

If I type "GitHub" in DDG, then the first result is the Wikipedia page, the second is some ad, and the third is the actual GitHub website. Seems in the wrong order if you ask me.

Anyway, I also use DDG, but I always end up using "!g". At least this gives DDG some metrics on how well they are doing.

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Your commemt doesn't make much sense to me. If a random person is searching for github, the top result probably should be from wikipedia. Someone actually using github on the other hand, would just type the address.

If we expand that, however, to non-technical users; no, they don't always just type the address. They type "github" into the address bar, and click on the search result for the actual site.

This behavior completely derailed my mom when her search bar was hijaacked by some just-barely-not-malware addon installed in the browser. Suddenly, she couldn't reach any of her sites.

Frustrating as hell, but at this point there's nothing I can do to change her behavior.

Isn't a non-technical person more likely to want to know what GitHub is than to go there?

You can remove the search bar altogether. In most modern browsers the address bar works as a search bar too.

I just checked on mobile, too. The first is a card listing the info from Wikipedia (is that what you meant?), the second is an ad, the third is GitHub, and the fourth is the Wikipedia entry. Seems like the right order.

And you have direct link to GitHub on that card, right under the title.

Typed "github" right now - github.com is the first one. First non-github result is 8th (git-scm.com). Not sure what's the difference.

Did you try on mobile? (I did)

Yes. My first result it Github.com with a blurb about the site and the Github logo. Wiki article is 3rd.

Desktop with an ad blocker (which is my typical use case) returns their official site first, then Wikipedia, etc... .

https://i.imgur.com/c8THJcm.png

Just for comparison I did this search on Google (UK site, logged in with my work account) as well, the first page of 'github' results are listed. It seems their are much more relevant and useful than the DDG results...

1. a clearly marked relevant ad at the top, for the circleci github plugin

2. an infobox at the right with details of the company, their web address, a link to their twitter account, and some related search queries

3. (first full-width result) link to github.com and summary text

4. a sub-search box to continue searching only on github.com

5. a short two-column list of six links to github.com sub sections

6. a link to the github twitter account and three square boxes across the page with its most recent tweets

7. the github wikipedia page

8. github youtube channel

9. github app for slack

10. github linkedin profile

11. github facebook page

Wow that's quite a load of useless crap, sensory information overload. For lack of a screenshot I imagine this is not presented in a consistent manner.

Apart from this inconsistent and confusing presentation, there is not much difference in actual results: duckgo offers results all with the same consistent appeareance:

1. github's homepage

2. wikipedia page about github

3. github's twitter

4. github desktop homepage

5. github's facebook

6. github's youtube

and then a load of github related results, as you can see here: https://i.imgur.com/bpDlNT1.png

Actually, it's pretty consistently designed and laid out - that's not something you can fault Google for these days. Here's a screenshot of Google https://i.imgur.com/tiVr0bd.png to compare with DDG https://i.imgur.com/01Lkf2z.png (with no ad-blocking on mine) - interestingly, the top adverts are the same, both CircleCI, but I prefer the Google version, which has pricing as well, much more likely to lead to a click. Also, DDG has a second advert, under the infobox on the right, so actually 200% of the advertising that Google serves!

You can turn off ads and instant answers in settings, or just type "!gh" and skip the middle step.

I cannot replicate your result.

https://i.imgur.com/zdAQrIB.png

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