Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Disclaimer: @yegg, if you're reading this, I'm posting this rant with love.

I am so disappointed with DDG recently, it has adopted Google's strategy of returning searches that have nothing to do with your query if not enough results were found [0], and dialed it up to 11. If "I" "don't" "put" "each" "word" "in" "quotes," the results I get have nothing to do with my search... but if I do that (apart from the inconvenience of it all) it means (presumably?) that stemming isn't done on the search terms.

Maybe I'm old school, but I expect search results to match the search terms. Fuzzy matching (stemming, synonyms) is an added bonus, but silently dropping words which don't appear is decidedly not. Moreover, a search result returning "only" two results should be taken as a good thing for someone with confidence in their dataset (DDG naturally doesn't have that, because their coverage is far from 100% of the web) - it means the search terms were extremely precise and the results are highly relevant, with irrelevant results filtered out. Decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio by willfully ignoring my search terms may increase the quantity of search results but - and I don't know about you - for me I don't care about quantity and would choose relevance as the more appropriate metric to benchmark against.

(All that said, I still use DDG as my main search engine even if I am turning to appending !g far more than I ever used to because I firmly prefer DDG's respect for my privacy and person over Google's treatment of the same. But I'm disgruntled and, frankly, very disappointed. Sorry, @yegg!)

[0]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-us...

Edit: actually the situation is even worse. DDG doesn't seem to even always respect "quoted" terms. Here's literally the first search I did after posting this [1]. The quoted term "CFF2" doesn't even appear in the majority of the results DDG pulls in - not just not in the page summary displayed, but literally not on the result page at all. For comparison, here's the Google equivalent:

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=windows+10+%22cff2%22&t=ffab&ia=we... [2]: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%2010%20%22cff2...

>Moreover, a search result returning "only" two results should be taken as a good thing for someone with confidence in their dataset

I completely agree with you here but in my experience it's not anything new with DDG, that's always been a problem as far as I'm concerned.

As a hobby I sometimes have to reverse engineer electronic circuits, when I'm not sure what a chip does I try to search the inscriptions on the package to see if I can find a datasheet online. Sometimes you end up with very cryptic strings like "xardc10-egh" or whatever. If you input this string on Google it gives you no results:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xardc10%2Degh

If I do it on DDG I get pages of irrelevant results:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xardc10-egh&t=ffab&ia=web

That being said DDG improved slightly, when I did searches like those a couple of years ago I'd often end up with results containing completely broken encodings, binary dumps as ascii and other obviously erroneous content that got indexed by mistake. Here the results at least appear to link towards proper pages.

Amusingly, if you search that phrase on Google now, your comment shows up as the only result. Their indexing is very fast.

Personally, I've moved to Searx due to similar issues with DDG results. Hopefully someday Chrome will allow you to use it on mobile.

Your rant is misdirected. This is a problem with Bing (the underlying search engine of DDG).

Seriously: Where do you get the idea that DuckDuckGo is just Bing? I can't find a single source for that claim. What I can find is a post from Gabriel Weinberg that says that DuckDuckGo is not Bing.

It comes up VERY times DuckDuckGo is mentioned, yet there's not a single source that suggests that DuckDuckGo is just a frontend for Bing.

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

I hope people click through, because this contradicts rather than supports your point.

So when you make non trivial query, how do you think ddg answers it? It is bing.

So again, please provide a source! I can't find one.

It's clear that DuckDuckGo used Bing for some result, but not to what extend. Are all result Bing? Does Bing only provide results when DuckDuckGos own crawler fails? Are the results mixed? I very much get the impression that results are mixed, but that's not completely clear either.

DDG has a crawler? Have you seen it active recently in your server logs?

Well they claim they do: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot

I should check server logs at work, I don't run my own web servers, so I can't claim to have seen it.

Their own crawler is only used for fluff like widgets. All organic search results are from Bing and Oath:

> 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.

I've seen the ddg bot in my home webserver (with a .com) logs in the past month. I even bothered to check to make sure it's IP matched the ones on the bot about page.

No, the rant is on point. I also try to make DDG my primary search engine and share the frustration.

Why should I care about where DDG gets its search results from? They promise a good web search and don't deliver.

I guess you're right. My point is that DDG can't really do anything about it. Also the reason why I won't use DDG.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com