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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

My problem has been DDG consistently produces worse results than google for many/most of my searches. It's often sufficient, but often it is so bad I have to redo the search in google :-/

I really want to use DDG over google, but it's just not there for me yet.

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I’ve been using DSG exclusively for about a year now and I've had the opposite experience: I've been amazed at how relevant the results have been. Occasionally, when struggling to find something, I'll use Google (via !g) and the results are, more often than not, mostly the same. It's rare for me to use Google search these days and when I do I'm annoyed by the assumptions it makes about my queries.

Fellow DDG user, but your observation about Google Searches is interesting... It may be the case that your limited use of Google is contributing to the poor assumptions it makes about your queries. The more Google tracks you, the better it can anticipate your intent.

Of course this is at the expense of privacy, filter bubble, etc. Still funny to think that Google may be over-optimizing around the presumption of an available browsing history. If true, Google could very well be degrading the anonymized experience on its sites. Could backfire in a more privacy-conscious future...

I've found better success with DDG if I give it keywords instead of questions. Over the years I think I've stopped viewing Google as a web search engine and started treating it as a "type any question and get an answer" service.

One could argue that the underlying goal of searching the web is to get an answer to a question, but one of these services is much better at taking a question and turning it into a result than the other. DDG feels like early/mid 2000s Google. Type keywords that you hope to find in close relation to each other on pages across the web. Meanwhile, Google has become _terrible_ at that. It tries to figure out what you want with such vigor it ends up ignoring parts of your query. In that regard DDG has been a better service for me.

Every now and then I won't find what I want and I'll throw a !g on the end of my query to Google it instead. Can't win 'em all. I'm just glad they're trying.

Instead of !g, try !s for Startpage, a proxied Google.

Google is definitely better, but DDG is good enough most of the time, and it has !g for when it isn't.

I've been using DDG for quite a few years now. At first, I would !g to Google pretty often, but these days it's pretty rare I feel the need, and when I do, Google is no better. I'm not sure if this is because Google no longer has enough information to tailor searches to me (seems unlikely), or DDG got better, or whether it's just that I've got better at expressing my searches in a form that works well on DDG. I'm not quite sure what I'm doing differently, but I'm sure that after several years how I express searches probably has changed a little.

I have the same problem, DDG seems to be sufficient but only for a niche of search results: mostly related to technology or technical searches or searches related to the US/websites in English.

As soon as you try to search something non technical or something local (non-US) the quality of search results drops significantly.

I find that if DDG isn't giving me good results - which it's true, it doesn't always - then I fallback to Startpage. Between the pair of them I only miss Google's Book service, so when I need it I go straight to it.

If only I could wean my friends and family off of Gmail, Chrome and Google Maps…

I find OsmAnd is generally a decent alterative to Google Maps, and actually it has better mapping of walking routes. Google Maps is better for transit directions and finding businesses - I haven't found good alternatives there yet.

It's the same for me, maybe worse because I do many search in Italian.

I'm currently using Startpage for this reason.

I agree with this, especially for long tail terms but I also think it is getting better with time. If it helps, you can use !g to search with Google.

The only way it's going to get there is if you keep feeding it. Much like Google :)

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