Hacker News Reader

Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

Long ago, when I still thought of Google as a good company that made good decisions for its users, I never had the impression that I'd done an exhaustive web search until I searched on Google. Now, searching Google always gives me the impression that I'm searching a heavily filtered, AI-curated subset of the web. I switched to DDG recently, and so far the results give me that impression that I'm searching 'the whole web' or something like it. I suppose it's inevitable that Google was ruined by becoming so enormous, having to be all things to everybody, especially its shareholders.

View on HN

I love DDG but the problem is that google is still the best whenever I want to search something that's not in English or that's localized. So I still use google for that.

I use DDG when I want nonlocalized results that aren't as biased

But most times I want information tailored specific to my issues so google is better for me 90% of the time.

Try Yandex if it is available in your language.

How is Yandex any better then Google?

Hmm, I get pretty good DDG search results in Japanese. I assume you're searching in your target language, rather than search terms in English with the name of your desired language tacked on?

To be fair, DDG is actually quite decent in Japanese but when searching in French I find that it's often lacking. I think it's mostly that French is not dissimilar enough from English for the search engine to pick up on it sometimes.

It might also have something to do with more French speakers knowing English than Japanese speakers knowing English.

also recent news. google still way above ddg on minutes old news.

The easiest way to view how wrongly Google has strayed is to search for something like "First Singer Songwriter". Google automates a rich card to say "Charles Trenet 1938" while showing an image of Woody Guthrie..

It's generating its own fake news at this point.

And its ignoring the long history of folk protest song eg "the world turnd upside down" which is a ECW protest song.

Oh and I forgot the medieval Chanson which is ever earlier.

Long long ago, I used to use Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, etc., and then I discovered AltaVista and I felt the similarly. The algorithms and relevance wasn't as good as what Google eventually came up with, but it felt like AltaVista had results that its contemporaries weren't getting.

DDG is starting to feel a bit like AltaVista in that regard.

DDG is mostly just Bing results in case you're unaware.

They use "over 400 sources" for results.

Most of their links come from their own webcrawler, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

TIL webcrawler still exists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com