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Comment by skinkestek | Hacker News Reader

Furthermore the quality of the attached search engine (measured as useful for a sw engineer) has been declining since 2009.

At this point duckduckgo is just as good and less annoying, not because they are crazy good but because they are about as good as Google was in 2009 and because Google has been going downhill meanwhile.

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> At this point duckduckgo is just as good and less annoying

I see this repeated all the time and I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only person who finds DDG results to be much worse. I tried DDG again this week and turned back within an hour.

Examples:

- I wanted to migrate a Debian 32Bit system to 64Bit. So I searched "debian convert from i386 to amd64". Google's top results are the official Cross-Grading docs from Debian Wiki, whereas DDG points to some outdated private pages and mailing list posts, with the official Debian Wiki not even in the Top10. Completely useless.

- I had the problem that with idx-Subtitles, Kodi would show white boxes instead of the proper text. So I searched "kodi idx white box". Google points to bug reports for my exact problem, whereas DDG shows pages for "fully loaded Kodi boxes" and "Best adult addons for Kodi". Again, completely useless.

- I wanted to build Kodi from source. So I searched "building kodi". Top Google results is the building instruction in the Kodi Wiki, DDG again shows obscure pages for the Titanium build and Steamlink ports.

This is all done in Firefox in private mode, so this is not because Google has tracked my behavior.

I agree. I've found DDG results to be sub-par in a variety of situations as well, and Google Search is sometimes almost oracular in it's prediciton of my search queries and surfaces the right solutions.

I really understand making the argument about privacy, , but Search is not the product to target here, it only seems to have gotten better these days, not worse.

>> This is all done in Firefox in private mode, so this is not because Google has tracked my behavior.

Other people have mentioned that your machine can still be tracked via browser fingerprinting despite being in private mode

OK, I just went to my wife's computer who has never searched for Kodi or Debian in her life. Exactly the same results in Firefox private mode.

You are likely to share the same IP. When my wife searches for something, I'm regularly bombarded by ads related to her searches, and vice versa

Here's some quick search results from DDG:

[debian migrate to 64 bit][search]

1st result: https://wiki.debian.org/Migrate32To64Bit

[kodi subtitle white box][search]

2nd result: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=335337

[kodi compile][search]

1st result: https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Compile_Kodi_for_Linux

Are you sure you aren't over-exaggerating DDG's supposed incompetence?

Thanks, you're actually proving my point: DDG is only successful if you use the exact wording used on the pages. Google is obviously much smarter, since it uses a semantic model that determines that 'building kodi' is the same as compiling it, that 'idx' refers to a subtitle format and 'converting' and 'migrating' are similar things.

> DDG is only successful if you use the exact wording used on the pages.

IMHO, your search keywords gave subpar results for an entirely different reason. For instance, the search terms you chose for your first two examples are overly technical considering the average users of Debian or Kodi. As for the third example, the term "build" is ambiguous because it's also frequently used to refer to binary releases. I was able to find the right results from DDG because I chose keywords that aren't confusing, not because I knew what to search beforehand. It's not so hard.

Yes, there are people out there using "overly technical", "confusing" and "ambiguous" search words. I'm afraid any company who wants to rival Google with have to deal with that fact; that's pretty much the whole problem of search in a nutshell.

Yet Google still manages to dtive me nuts to the point that I enjoy using duckduckgo :-/

If Google peaked in 2009 and has been declining since then, then any search engine that's as good as they were then would be better than they are now, not as you say "just as good".

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