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Comment by eof | Hacker News Reader

Well, they certainly can't compete on search quality.

“Certainly”? I doubt the deservedness of that certainty.

DDG satisfies most of my searches on the first go, and I’ve never had success with !g after a failed DDG query.

Furthermore, the Google results has a cluttered design with sparse information, so it takes much longer to figure out that I haven’t found what I’m looking for.

I’d say Google is the one failing to compete on search quality. At one point they did, but now Google’s consumer products compete on brand awareness and price, which they can only do because of their conquests in the advertising industry. Most people are not Google’s customer, they are part of Google’s enterprise product: the attention of people whose data profiles meet various requirements.

Yes, certainly. DDG very often have quite okay results while Google has almost always outstanding results. I have to use !g quite often when searching for a programming or architecture solutions that are just slightly more complex than mainstream. I am using DDG mostly because I trust in the cause. OK, I admit that bangs are nice. That being said, both our comments are just an opinions. I'd gladly see a research about their accuracy.

Remember that "Bing it on" campaign Microsoft ran, to show that in a blind test, users couldn't tell the difference between Bing search results and Google search results?

Well, Microsoft's test completely backfired on me. I ran the test many times. In most cases, one of the columns had clearly better results, and 80+% of the time, that column was Google.

Small sample size to be sure, but it covers 100% of the population I care about in choosing a search engine (me).

Granted, this was Bing, not Google, but I kind of doubt DDG would fare better. (And in non-blind tests, I definitely fell I'm getting the worst results from DDG).

In my experience the difference between Google and DDG results is that when Google has desired page as the first result, DDG will have it somewhere on the first page of results. Definitely not as good, but still very much comparable.

And I also pretty much never have to use !g. DDG results are sufficient most of the time, and when they are not, I notice Google usually also fails to provide satisfactory results.

I use ddg as my primary search. I haven’t counted but my gut says I do a second search on google ~40% or more.

I like ddg, i support them, but for any but the most basic queries google is a solid tier above.

True

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