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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I prefer DDG's UI and instant answers over Google's (and DDG's !bang searches). I dislike how Google will frequently disregard words in my search queries. I only fall back to Google for extremely narrow searches for technical topics or recent events.

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The frequency with which google chooses to leave out critical keywords is insane. A huge amount of my experience now with google is: search, search again with quotes because I know what I want, thanks google. Get the results, they are full of garbage.

DDG's image search beats the pants off of Google's, too.

At least it still has a View Image button.

Really? How so?

They certainly don’t have related/similar images, which I find useful.

Google Image Search has been intentionally crippled ever since the Getty vs Google lawsuit. GIS now seems to prefer showing me 'maxresdefault.jpg' YouTube thumbnails for at least 50% of results, presumably because the uploaders of those videos gave Google a license to use/distribute the work. Even for copyrighted works that still gives Google another party to blame.

Could you go into more details? What exactly were the ramifications of the lawsuit?

My understanding of it as an outsider is that Getty Images filed a suit against Google seeking money for their images being displayed in GIS results. They later announced a settlement, and the 'View Image' button disappeared and the search result quality plummeted (my judgement) at exactly the same time. Here's some more reading:

https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/09/getty-images-and-google-d...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...

I agree, aside from the 'Color' filter. I've found DDG's is very picky about choosing images that are _only_ comprised of your chosen color, instead of predominantly comprised like Google seems to do.

By the way, DDG image search is just Bing

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