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Comment by Gracana | Hacker News Reader

By comparison to other search engines. Duckduckgo seems to give me better search results and is less influenced by advertisements and trends.

What finally pushed me away from Google was its incorrect assumption of equivalence between different terms. I'd search something like "printer scaling draftsight" and it would return results with "printer" "scaling" and "autocad" all in bold. Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.

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> Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.

Yeah I've noticed this a lot in recent months/years. Have been finding myself putting most of the keywords of the query in quotation marks to get any kind of results relevant to my actual query. Like 'printer "scaling" "draftsight"' just so that G wouldn't make some stupid assumptions.

Which has started working as good as Amazon internal search...

One page of results with 8 of 10 completely unrelated.

Unfortunately, DDG has a close relationships with the kgb's outlet yandex (and trying not to mention that anywhere unless asked directly), which is absolute showstopper for me

This is the first time I'm hearing this. Can you provide more information please?

There is a useful edge case to this. In my case I was searching for a specific bit of content that had too few results in English so Google started returning results based on similar search terms in another language. It took a bunch of quotes and some specific strings to get into that state in the first place though.

This is the larger problem... Google thinks it's making our search easier by force feeding us what we obviously don't want.

It interprets what it thinks I meant instead of listening to the actual words that came out of my mouth.

I have the same problem with my wife... :-)

You're right; right on multiple levels...heh

Language is used to convey meaning. The difference between my wife and Google is that Google tries to interpret language in the lowest common denominator which leaves all people who try to use language properly feeling like they need to learn a new one just to be understood by their search engine.

...maybe that's not so different.

https://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1

I was not able to replicate your issues and did not notice any similar said results from my end. Have you tried searching under another account or with a different machine perhaps? Just for testing purposes.

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