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Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

At some point, the slowly-increasing quality curve of DDG's results crosses the rapidly-decreasing organicity curve of Google's results and you switch. For me the curves crossed two years ago.

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break out of your bubble. Try using DDG with sth. else than english. Then try sth. related to programming. Good luck. I'm so tired of people claming that DDG is better in every aspect, it's not.

It’s not better. Specifically, autocomplete doesn’t work as well, and you’re missing not just google but maps, images, and translations. But it’s getting better all the time, and at this point you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a query (even programming related) which doesn’t have the result you want on the first page. The point of the original author is that the quality of DDG continues to improve, not that it’s better.

But the majority of people won't change if it's not clearly better, why would they? Also most of this doesn't matter if you are using AdBlock (or whatever) anyway. Of course this isn't ideal. Sure it might work for some using DDG, but it does not for the majority.

> At this point you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a query (even programming related) which doesn’t have the result you want on the first page

No problem for me, unfortunately. See my post below, but these really were my first three after switching to DDG.

- 'debian convert from i386 to amd64'

   Should show https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading

- 'kodi idx white box'

   Any bug report to idx subtitles showing white boxes

- 'building kodi'

   https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Compile_Kodi_for_Linux

It seems DDG has much more problems with SEO spam, which unfortunately is rampant for Kodi. However, it's a mistery why for instance the Debian Wiki would not show up in the first search.

Why? I switched to DDG a while back too, because for my uses it works as well or better than google most of the time. Who cares if it’s objectively better in every way or not. As he said, as DDG continues to improve it will become good enough for more and more people.

Uh, they said that DDG is improving, and that improvement was enough to get them off Google. They didn't claim DDG was better in every way.

Two of my primary languages are Thai and Japanese and I use DDG as my primary search engine. DDG results for non-English language are not as good as Google, but I found it to be only a _minor_ inconvenient.

They've been rapidly improving, and I found myself append !gj to the query less and less over the past few years. While I might not be able to find what I was looking for within the first few results, usually clicking to the second page get me what I wanted.

I didn't claim that. For me DDG is usually better and when it's not, that's what !g is for.

That's like saying Chrome is faster than Firefox. It might be true, but people here wish it wasn't true, so they'll scold you.

Same for me. Switched to DDG toward end of 2017 on my desktops and early 2018 for my mobile phone.

Actually using Google now feels like a downgrade. The AMP garbage is just another issue I’ve avoided.

I suspect that every person commenting about how DDG has been improving is a person that doesn't know that DDG simply calls the Bing API.

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