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Comment by stryk | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that, in the last several months, DDG's top search results have been getting much better? I almost always find the most relevant links at the top of the first page, and when directly comparing their results to Google's, DDG results may be in a slightly different order but they are still really close.

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~85% of my searches on DDG are great (and improving), and the !bang syntax handles the rest; usually "the rest" are esoteric items. I see no reason to use anyone else as a primary search engine anymore.

I made DuckDuckGo my browser's default search engine a few years ago out of principle, but I would switch to Google very quickly because it was still so much better.

In the last few months I noticed it had become incredibly good as well, so I've mostly stopped using Google search. (Now looking for a privacy-focused competitor to Gmail and Google Maps, and a phone that can run the Android OS without any spyware, bloatware, or planned obsolescence).

I agree that they are getting better, and glad that in my experience they are not the same. DDG is better for evergreen topics, Google seems to overvalue local / recent now.

DDG has been improving a lot over the past few months, though IMO it's still far from perfect. It also still lacks the math and conversion tools from google ("19 gigabit / 10000 milliseconds in TBit/s")

I prefix those queries with !wa. It's fairly slow, but it does much better unit conversions than Google and the scale comparisons are usually fun and often useful.

That didn't work for me :( Google have already indexed your comment though!

Sometimes google is a bit fiddly with the exact formatting but they usually get it eventually. I would love a feature like that in DDG.

Looks like you have to spell out the whole word terabit, or abbreviate it to Tb.

I recommend https://wolframalpha.com as a replacement for those types of queries. It’s even better than Google for that.

Nice to hear about this. The last time I tried to switch, two or three years ago, the results (a lot of dev related stuff) were really not very good. I'll try it again.

May give them another shot... I intended to try them for a month a couple years ago (left after about 2 weeks, well short of a full month). The results were so much worse for me than google. Having some insight into the usage details they get from analytics cannot be underestimated.

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