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Comment by xref | Hacker News Reader

I switched from Chrome+Goog to Firefox+DDG...but had to dump DDG a week later. The results just aren’t anywhere near on par with google. The results have no dates so I’m constantly served results to outdated tech info (5 year old posts about Cassandra, no thanks DDG), and they only present 1 link to an article vs the more info-dense google format with 1 primary link to say, StackOverflow, and 4 more possible hits smaller just below it presented as “more from this site.”

Basically I get more done faster with google search, however much I hate the goog panopticon. I’ve also switched to Apple News and Maps so I’m very much trying to dump goog, but search is where they still really excel.

I do wish I’d come back to Firefox sooner though, absolutely love it post quantum.

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I've taken to using DDG and when I find that the results are unsatisfactory, I stick a '!g' at the start or the end of my query, and it redirects to the google results page.

Like I mentioned though, with no dates every page is unsatisfactory. I’m not gonna waste time clicking each link to look at the date before I devote time to reading it

I JUST ran into this. It's not good for tech searches for this very reason. I was trying to look up an issue with an application, and every link I clicked on was from 7 years ago.

I switched to google and instantly grabbed some ones from 2019

This is the kind of feedback DDG should take seriously.

then use DDG's time filter.

That's tough when the only filters are "1 month", "1 week", and "1 day". Is there some way to get 1 year? I ask as a daily ddg user

That seems like a good approach until you consider that you don’t know whether the results are unsatisfactory if you aren’t looking at both sets of results on each search. You can’t see what you don’t look at and you can’t know what you don’t know. Google may have a better result for you, but how would you know unless you search both engines?

That's not what satisfactory means.

“Unsatisfactory” is an opinion-based comparison. If you find something that satisfies your desire, it’s satisfactory. I’d say your argument is more based on whether the results are more accurate, or “better” in some more concrete way.

I was doing g! at work for tech searches so often I switched back. I gave it several months of effort. One example, I was googling an AWS service related question and the front page was blogs and garbage. g! had the official docs at the relevant part as the first result.

This happens way too often, and I like to think not because of personalized results.

You could use s! As an alternative to startpage (which serves google results but without google directly tracking you)

I've has the same experience; firefox has been comparable to chrome in functionality but ddg is just awful compared to google. Maybe it'll get better as time goes on...

I've been using ddg as default for over year now. But I do pull Google results when querying documentation.

Funnily enough, I've been using DDG for a few years and results have definitively improved to the point I'm using less and less !g

And when I do use !g results (especially tech related) are not that good ! Maybe because Google have not enough info to set me in the correct "bubble" ?

DDG does the job for me.

Startpage.com is a good alternative for those who don't find DDG results satisfactory.

And you can get to startpage by doing !s instead of !g.

> constantly served results to outdated tech info

Just to be contrarian... maybe there's some useful signal there about why you might prefer technologies without so much churn.

One problem I wish Google would solve is this. When I'm looking to solve a problem I've found that tons of first page results are dated but years. Adobe cc for example, they are churning updates, lots of people are having the same issues once I actually go to Adobe but the results are sometimes a decade old!

but both Google and DDG let you filter by date. Does that not work for you?

Biggest problem in your problem is Adobe. It's an utter nightmare to keep up with the constant UI changes - I really wish they'd invest more time in fixing crashes than moving shit around.

If anyone here is at Adobe, please for the love of god hammer it into the heads of your PMs to do three or four sprints dedicated only to resolving bugs and crashes.

Just to be clear (since downvotes and replies suggest I wasn't) my point is that if you're using a technology where anything written two years ago is out of date and now useless information, maybe instead of using a search engine that shows newer information you should rather prefer to use technologies where ten-year-old information is still relevant. I'm pretty sure anything I read about TeX today is going to continue to be useful information ten years from now. Not so much anything I read about Kubernetes or the non-relational database du jour. (Which is why I prefer not needing to read about those things ever.)

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