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Comment by GiuseppaAcciaio | Hacker News Reader

I keep on trying to love duckduckgo but find that often even typing the exact title of an article I'm looking for, it's not on the first page of results...

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I have Google routinely deciding that I didn't mean to use ALL three words I searched for and "helpfully" dropping them. Sure, I can tell it "no, I really want those", but the experience is definitely becoming more and more sub-par for me. As bad is when a search doesn't give me what I want, so I narrow it, only to find that Google uses my previous search to decide what I want to see so I still end up finding similar results.

I remember when Google blew us away with Page Rank (goodbye Alta Vista!), but in the last few years Google has gotten so good on providing entry-level information that it's useless for finding specifics, so I expect the next Big Thing in search to come along, though I have no idea how far out it is.

Fun example of this: last week I was trying to figure out all the floating point operations that can produce NaN. Go ahead and try searching Google for "ways to make nan"; it's going to show you dozens of pages of naan recipes, and there isn't even a link to click to make it actually search for what you've typed (instead there's a link for Did you mean "ways to make naan"?, which shows a different set of naan recipes).

Although the tailored results have been useful, I think I still like the days back when you needed search operators. I was once looking up stuff about electrons (the particle). A plain query of electron only returned results for the framework on my first page. Understandable.

The other annoyance is the lack of Wikipedia results. For a general topic, I like to have a few pages to chooses from about the topic in addition to Wikipedia. Rarely are Wikipedia results in my organic listing unless I specifically add wiki or Wikipedia.

By the way, this[0] is how to search your query.

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=ways+to+make+%22nan%22+-%22n...

Interesting. Wikipedia what my top result when I DDG'd "floating point operations that produce NaN"

Did you try your own sentence "floating point operations that can produce NaN." "Making nan"is a very tricky query, because it has no context that is related to floating point. I think it is not fair to expect anything else. If you give a slight context like "operations that make nan" you will get results.

Yeah, "ways to make nan", even being familiar with the domain, is an extremely unintuitive way to phrase that query.

Holy cow that's bad. It says: Showing results for ways to make naan. Search instead for 'ways to make nan'.

Fair enough, so click on the Search Instead and it says "Did you mean: ways to make naan" and then shows a bunch of links about breadmaking anyways.

You can use: ways to make +"nan"

Disclaimer: didn't test it, but I often use this trick to force G to use some word, and to use it exactly as written.

Google dropped support for + years ago but you could try using -naan and "nan".

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

OMG, well that could've been made more known. Wonder what the cumulative cost to my life has been.

wow I didn't know that

Ha, what do you know... :D I actually always use startpage.com, but since they are using Google, I assumed they passed this query to it. What is interesting is that this trick still works on startpage.com while it doesn't on google... I must say I'm even less impressed by Google search than I was before. It's getting worse and worse.

Its too bad it ignores the case of NaN (and other queries)

idk, but I think they employ multiple tokenizing strategies, including case insensitive, case sensitive,by words, by n-grams of letters...

a search for your question "all the floating point operations that can produce NaN" gave useful results for me.

Can you post an example? I’ve been using DDG for years, and have never encountered this.

Also, the DDG devs are certainly lurking on this thread, and can fix the class of queries in question.

No, they can't since DDG is a wrapper for Bing.

I have been using DDG primarily ever since Google tried to pull that login shenanigan on Chrome users. Switched to FF and DDG and with the occasional !g, I'm content. Try !b and tell me it's the same as DDG's results.

I think they sometimes mix yandex, yahoo and other stuff as well. There is a reason they never disclose what percentage of queries are served from which source, kinda spoils their magic i guess. Kudos to bing team though, they seem to improved quite a bit apparently.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.

So its 95% bing/yahoo. I wish they were more transparent. But it does not sound nice when they say do not useevilgoogle instead use our slightly modified bing/yahoo wrapper.

Is it against the ToS of Google to perform search on someone's behalf and relay them the results?

This happens to me sometimes, and is why "!g" is DDG's killer app.

I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine. One place it drops the ball is in searching for anything health related. Top of the page: homeopathy, conspiracy theories and supplement salesmen.

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