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Comment by chuckgreenman | Hacker News Reader

I think I've figured out what is happening when people tell me that DuckDuckGo's results "aren't good enough".

What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well.

After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and which bangs to use to get results from the sites that I want. It's a more effective tool if you learn how to use it.

View on HN

A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS.

You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch.

What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.

One could ask that you provide clear examples of searches that don't work right for you, then maybe we can provide advice.

Have you tried it recently?

I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better).

I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap.

Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I did had 3?

I suspect the article is right about google being better about low intent searches (and just generally bad search queries from regular people which probably make up the vast majority of users), but I don’t care about that. I think DDG is probably better for more technical users.

I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are literally building a new search experience because we are deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.

Any links to your new project?

Yup there is (alpha.whize.co) the question mark at the top links to a blog post with our broader goals though we've refined them a bit since that post.

I'll warn you though, the alpha has a really limited index (github results) but was meant to showcase how we think we'll initially prioritize results and gauge people's interest versus this is the final version because as you can imagine crawling the larger internet is a bigger task and if no one was interested we weren't going to do it.

That said we did have a healthy amount of people try it out (over 2000) and are still seeing people use it now over a month out so we've been full steam ahead on our generic crawler, plus a few social media specific crawlers and we expect to have our beta available mid May.

No offense, but I literally cannot find anything on GitHub with this search engine.

It's tuned towards discovery, so if you search a topic you'll get results for smaller, new repos that do something around that topic. We deliberately hard downranked common repos but it's also 2 months out of date now since that was to test the waters and we didnt set up recrawling at the time. That said we shared your concerns and have changed things up with how we are approaching it for the beta

> We deliberately hard downranked common repos

Wasn't google criticized here on HN for downranking specific results? If I'm looking for something, probably I'm looking for the most common, I think

So we didn't pick specific repos, but we crafted a function based on some metrics we we're using from Github that had a sharp drop off after a certain point and basically -any- super common or well known repo would be down ranked based on those metrics.

I can appreciate your thought on that but we're not necessarily geared towards the most common per se (though this might be me misunderstanding what you mean) as we have experienced multiple times the most common result being wrong or outdated and the way things are now it takes a long time for those to slide out of the rankings.

We've been asking around for a while now to flesh out what our actual thought is and the description for the problem we're solving right now is "information staleness", you search for something and it leads you to a reddit post but that's outdated by 5 years and then you wind up actually having to do a deep dive and it turns out there was actually a more accurate post from a year ago but it just hasn't crept up to the top yet because everything references the 5 year old post.

With our alpha we actually think we went too much in the other direction we focused on it all being super super new but the reality is there is nuance between different topics for what timeframe information decays in, if that makes sense, and now we're for the beta trying to strike a better balance.

Right, it makes sense. What I end up doing a lot of times, is manually filtering by "last year". It's good to give preference to more recent results. Thanks for the explanation

I’ve always had the opposite experience with DDG. Technical queries gave just garbage results, where as I got meaningful hits on google each time. </anecdote>

Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google they've got search on lock.

I don’t fully buy the whole “need to move away from google” part. Yes privacy, yes ads, yes SEO gaming, yes monotechopocolpyse. But the reality is they don’t sell my data, they’ve been a good steward of my search queries over the years (and have tools to clear my history or log me out and not save them), and their product is still the best over two-ish decades.

If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, not give me a poor clone with ! tools to force me to compensate for a not great search engine. Give me a fundamentally different experience that actually innovates in this space. I’d love to see the competition, but somehow it hasn’t materialized in all these years.

> If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it,

The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need to leave Google traces.

Why is that sufficient reason? I'm not particularly concerned about Google having my search history. As I've said before, they've been good stewards with it over 20 years.

The same thing was true for me until it wasn’t, I stayed on DDG after trying it again probably three months ago.

<anecdote>This thread made me change to DDG (again). A few minutes later gimp was crashing on me, so I did the lazy thing: C&P some of the error into the search engine.

This is the result of my fist search switching to DDG: https://i.imgur.com/05LxLDv.png

DDG results are utterly useless, while google gives three highly relevant results solving my issue within a few seconds. Happens all the time. DDG: I want, I just can't.

PS: And I'm not a person searching for anything gimp all the time, my browser history shows three prior "how to x in" gimp searches over the last year. Adding to that this is google.com not logged-in in a Firefox container solely for google searches where storage is scrapped somewhat regularly. </anecdote>

This query seems to work a lot better:

    "the program gimp received an x window system error"

DDG used to have issues with responsiveness on their page. Years later I tried it again and it actually feels right. A lot of work has gone into performance optimization and it has sucked me in.

It might be more effective if you try it yourself. Google something you normally google, then repeat the search with &pws=0 at the end of the query string.

Interesting, what is the pws arg?

It turns off personalised (based on your browsing/search history) search results.

I think it's something like 'personalized web search' so you turn it off. That used to be the way to do it anyway.

Considering the base idea isn't that DDG's search is better, but that their privacy is better, it's kinda the opposite. The people not using DDG would have to provide clear examples. (Or just say that they don't care enough about Google's privacy issues to switch.)

I agree. I’ve been in the DDG camp for a little while, but I finally had to switch back to google as my primary search engine on my laptop - fixing searches was taking too much time. That’s after two or three months of using DDG and Bing exclusively

> You need to provide clear examples

Nope, I don't. I don't care what search engine you like. I do want to see Google knocked down several pegs, but fan rants aren't going to do that.

I just keep using DDG as it gets better while Google gets worse and sometimes think a little about the variety of the human experience.

Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in the results page, I bounce before I can find it.

From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me.

However, I’m really not sure why I can’t use Google anymore. It was better when I switched away, so I definitely used to be able to use it (I didn’t log in back then either).

Ddg is fine, and more respectful to its users. I don’t have a practical reason to figure out what the problem is.

I think, on reflection, the issue is that typing “harry potter sport” and clicking on the wikipedia article at the very top of the page (above the first ad) is a much lower cognitive burden than the Google way, where I guess people are trained to type “harry potter” and then skim an entire page of ads, search results and noise to find the word “Quidditch” (which doesn’t appear, I just checked).

If I google harry potter sport, it presents the Wikipedia article in a context box, then the same article in a differently formatted context box, an ad, and then a third link to the same article at the top of the organic results.

Duck duck go displays the same link twice (once in a big context box). This seems better, though arguably not great.

A Google search for me produces the word "Quidditch" in a box along with a link to the Wikipedia page for Quidditch and the first paragraph of that article. The box appears at the very top of the results. I'm not sure how a search result for that query could be much more useful.

I can confirm that I also see this, both in my regular Firefox instance where I do everything and in an incognito Chrome window. Specifically, I get, in order from top to bottom, with only trivial differences between those two cases:

A box with "Quidditch" in big letters, a picture and a brief description.

Some "People also ask:" with questions that do seem to be reasonably relevant.

The Wikipedia page about Quidditch.

Some video links, all relevant.

Some images, all relevant.

Another Wikipedia page about Quidditch.

A page about the "Department of Magical Games and Sports" from some Harry-Potter-specific wiki.

Same wiki's "games and sports" category.

"Beyond Quidditch: games and pastimes in the wizarding world" from www.wizardingworld.com.

NPR article about real-world quidditch games.

Quora question about other sports in Harry Potter.

Related searches: a bunch of Harry Potter things which seem pretty relevant.

Related search: "Quidditch teams".

A bunch of "Searches related to harry potter sport" which mostly also seem relevant.

So ... the organization of the page is a little weird in places, but this seems like an excellent set of search results for that query. The DDG results are also perfectly fine, though they feel slightly worse than the Google ones to me.

Might have wanted to try this, before using this example. As other commenters have noted, this immediately offers up ‘Quittich’ at the first result.

I have this same problem. I use the same "subject sub-subject (...) specific query" tactic I've been using since forever and Google search has been becoming less effective for me over the years. I switched to DDG a couple of years ago I think, and it's better for handling that sort of thing.

Is there a search engine out there that respects quotes, and, or, case-insensitive when asked for, etc? In some ways I miss the days of altavista and similar search engines which had "advanced" tabs you could use to craft your query as closely as needed to find that one web page you know has what you need to find that you stumbled upon years ago.

The only time I use what the author refers to as "low intent searches" is when I've just heard a term or phrase I don't understand and don't know enough about it to ask specifically for something.

Go into google search options and select verbatam to include all search terms.

What's going on is those of us who have been using the Web since Google was brand new (or earlier...remember AltaVista?) expect a search engine to find text on web pages.

What the average user in the post-smartphone world expects a search engine to do is deliver an answer to a question. These are basically incompatible, and it seems like a progressively smaller circle of the Web is being surfaced by Google these days, as they focus heavily on popularity and novelty.

Just a heads up; post-smartphone means the era after the smartphone.

Maybe you intended to say this, then I'm really curious about your perspective?

> Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries

This is the problem I've been having with DDG, where it will aggressively rewrite my search into something completely unrelated

I switched for about a month... for most general searches ddg was as good or better... when searching for development terms as a programmer, I found that the ddg results were often worthless to me. The context that google has associated to you specifically adds value to the results.

Since most of my searches were for technical libraries, components, etc, I found myself searching again with !g more than half the time... after the month was up, I switched back. There are a LOT of things I like about ddg though.

It would be nice if DDG offered search roles, that could prioritize certain associated terms together for someone that is say a programmer, engineer, social media person, etc. This could be opt-in to maybe a dozen categories to skew results on one way or another, but not tied to a person per-se.

Also, a shorter domain name would help.

> Also, a shorter domain name would help.

I'm surprised your browser doesn't just search from the "awesome bar", making navigating to the domain a non-event

However, the answer to your question is ddg.gg (unknown if that's short enough, but it's only 3 keys to press)

I use DDG for 2 years already, and I'm a developer, I've never experienced ur problem, and I do search for technical stuff all the time. I dont see how DDG can fail to show u a documentation or library result, especially if you know what u are looking for

duck.com :)

I've said this before, but I really don't get any useful results from Google at all anymore. I have to prefix Reddit for every search to at least try to get a vaguely human answer to a question.

Of course Reddit is still gamed and has plenty of other issues, but far less than Google at this point.

Just to be clear, are you saying DDG gives you better results? I was just thinking about how google has this problem

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS.

That's no more or less BS than people saying that "DDG results are shit". I don't see anything wrong with trying to guess why DDG doesn't work well for some people, even if the conclusion happens to offend someone's personal choices.

An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the job.

Have you tried switching `United Kingdom` to on?

https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF

I have exactly the same issue with it in Wellington, NZ.

Even with "New Zealand" turned on at the top, it gives me quite a few results for things in Wellington, Florida.

If I don't specify "Wellington" or "NZ" in the search terms, results are even worse, even with "New Zealand" turned on: I get results from Australia, Dubai, even the UK for various search terms. (and some of the TLDs are things like "com.au" or ".co.uk" so it should be trivial to filter those out.)

Google's not perfect in this regard, but it's an order of magnitude better in my experience for localised queries, even with both in Incognito/Private mode.

> If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me.

If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine.

Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of the UK?

The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names

> it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make much sense.

For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this search myself, from outside San Francisco, and there's just a single result in the 94105 area. But there are plenty shown in 94107, 94103, 94102, 94111... (primarily 94107).

The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.

> For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code

I am seeing literally that issue with both Google and DuckDuckGo so maybe that depends on the region. My search results, both logged-in and in a private window, are limited to car mechanic websites that mention the zip code. The Google Maps search is not limited, but it's not very good in general, so I usually avoid it. DuckDuckGo finds practically no results in the map view (Apple Maps).

> The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.

So is "car mechanic bristol uk". The parent's entire point is that DuckDuckGo doesn't consider context for natural language searches and claiming that everyone else is searching wrong is completely missing the point.

Lithuania, Slovakia and Indonesia also have 94105 as a valid post code.

Post codes are not particularly human friendly (though British ones like N1C 4AG are a bit better than just numbers; it's easy to see the N, N1, N1C prefixes in that).

Couldn't DDG use the users location in a non evil way instead of not using it at all, like 1998 Google?

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch.

The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1]

For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language, when I search DDG. (This may be an outdated habit from my long exposure to search tools.) With modern Google though, I find that if I follow my habit and use keywords, my search results are poor. I have better results using natural language. As others have noted, I have better results when searching Google when I don't know what the thing I'm looking for is called, or when I'm looking for esoteric content (like code samples.)

[1] I'm not saying that switching is easy or even ideal, I'm just underscoring that different tools are... different. ;-) And "knowing" how to use search well is kinda hard these days, as everything keeps evolving, and we're all busy doing other things.

I have a hard time believing there's actually much google-specific adaption going on for anyone except the biggest HN nerd.

My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I look at my google search history and it's just generic search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle.

Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. And I think people really just mean you have to add more context to DDG queries because it's easily confused. Like how "elm list" gives great results in google and bad results in DDG.

> Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me.

Totally agree. But even Google is nowhere near perfection here, so we’re left with the same two strategies we all use when searching:

* try over and over * continually tweak queries

It’s especially easy to forget that we often actually search multiple times, because we do it so quickly that it’s an ingrained habit.

Actually the article in this post provides exactly that. https://www.bitlog.com/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-is-good-enough-... Look for the bit about Harry Potter.

Let's say there's a new can opener in the drawer [1], it's the same size and shape as a can opener but because it's not what you're used to you try to use it in the normal orientation and it doesn't work.

Even though the tool can open cans, rounds off the sharp edges and requires less grip force you reply with: a lot of OXO folks blame the user or social conditioning. It's BS.

Is that a reasonable response?

I'd argue that it isn't.

But to answer your question I use more precise language for what I'm looking for, specifying the city and state I want results from, specifying the type of thing that I want.

A lot of my searches are !bangs,

!godoc - for searching Go packages !gems - for searching ruby gems !sx - for getting only stack overflow results !w - for jumping to a Wikipedia article !gh - for searching github

- [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000079XW2?tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&...

Funnily enough I just got an example of this from a friend who is trying DDG this week.

Her example query that did better on Google than DDG:

> why did robinhood go down feb 29 2020

What I would search for the same question that does better on DDG:

> robinhood down

She's 24 and I'm 29 so it's possible that difference is real, people who are younger may be tailoring searches in a way that benefits Google (in which case they may not benefit as much from DDG or really would have to change behavior).

GP isn't a peer-reviewed journal, it's an opinion insight.

For me the differences are:

Google is better at dealing with topics that are trending and providing data right on the SERP without having to click through. If I want to look up the latest Corona Virus stats, I'd do so on google. As the article states, things like Google's stock panel are just superior to other options.

But DDG is better at historical searches. It's like they try to 'understand' you less and want to provide you with all possible things you could be looking for. Like Google used to do and like I prefer. I've looked up old articles I had read and wanted to reference when writing an article. On Google and they just don't come up. No matter what I do: use the date tool, use quotes, etc, it's like Google thinks it's too old/irrelevant for me, so no matter what I search, it won't give it to me. But on DDG, they are there and will come up with the right set of keywords.

I uaed google the last 3 years on my desktop while I used DDG on my phone, so I have a pretty good feeling about the differences. I started using duckduckgo because I accidentally set the default search engine to it and thought: OK I might as well use that for a while.

The question you ask is hard to answer because the differences depend on the thing you are searching for. My feeling: for searching code stuff google is a tad better, while for everyday stuff duckduckgo seems to display more relevant results.

It is definitly worth trying, just to notice the subtle things google does sometimes.

I use DDG on a daily basis, being my default search engine for the past two years.

However I don't agree — many of my searches have awful results on DDG compared with Google and I often find no words to make it better.

Local searches are an obvious candidate, DDG is awful for my native language, giving me results in Spanish (I'm Romanian).

But lately I'm noticing programming-related results being worse on DDG as well. I'm not sure why because they used to be similar, but now some of the results DDG is giving me (for very specific search terms) are really, really bad, many times DDG ignoring my keywords and giving me something else entirely.

It's fine for now, I prefer the privacy, but they'd better improve and fast.

My experience with DDG has been exactly the same, not just with programming- and, in my case, math-related search terms but also when I look for personal websites of people in academia. On Google, it's usually the first search result but it often isn't even among the first 10 in DDG.

I've been a DDG booster for a while. Their search results are usually good enough. Except after longer use I've found two major issues that eventually forced me back to Google:

1. I can Image Search the most basic of terms and literally get "No Results Found" once or twice a day. Sometimes I'll get like... 8 photos.

2. I will weirdly get the Wikipedia link for a relevant query, but the British or Spanish or some other version often isn't even in English. And I do have "Canada" toggled on.

3. You can't search for "older than" results. For example, if you want news reports about Ukrainian corruption, but only from before 2015, you're out of luck on ddg, have fun reading about Trump.

> ... the British or .. some other version often isn't even in English.

There's only one regular English version of the Wikipedia, unless you're refering to the Galic one, which would be a little odd (https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%ADomhleathanach).

I'm surely messing up the details. I just remember getting other versions of Wikipedia as my main result.

I got the scots one once when I searched for the Hoover dam.

https://sco.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam

At first I thought either I was going crazy or the article had been vandalized. But then I figured out that DDG hadn't taken me to the English result.

I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head here, in that DuckDuckGo requires you to know its incantations, and Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all. I can even obliterate the spelling of words and it often knows what i'm looking for.

Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google often lacks in some of these areas (like being able to filter by a specific grouping of sorts, like if I want a "dev focused" search, not just filtering by a specific site, DDG has some methodology here that I haven't been able to easily surface with Google)

But there are cases where I've noticed DDG falling behind, like indexing newer content, or being able to filter by time accurately.

> Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all.

I disagree -- the decline of the quality of Google's search appears to have begun when it started trying to second-guess what I'm searching for, and has continued to decline ever since.

Today I was trying to find info about Corpus Christi - a Polish film that won some awards lately. DDG gives me information about a place in Texas, including stuff from the local newspaper and attractions. I'm searching from a Poland IP btw. Anyway, the actual film was at the very end of the first page of results for me.

It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly.

Google Maps has a similar issue though: plenty of US placenames are just stolen from European places and oftentimes I'll be trying to get directions to a nearby town and instead it'll navigate to someplace in Alabama instead. Strangely enough, not where I want to go...

Did you include the word "film" in your search? Otherwise there's no reasonable expectation for it to show up. It's like searching for "Philadelphia" and expecting the movie to show up and not the city.

I understand what you're suggesting but for fun I did that search on DDG and the film was the 8th result (on the first page of results ;)

The experiment was a success

So does Google, "Corpus Christi" is too ambiguous.

"Corpus Christi polish film" is good enough. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&...

"Corpus Christi film" also works, results look relevant, but knowledge graph shows the old 2014 Venezuelan movie. This is where Google is way superior, it showed me average score on imdb and even local showtimes.

I imagine that if you were searching from a Polish IP, Google would infer that you meant the movie, not the city. For anyone in the United States, however, I'd expect the city to be the more common search.

Corpus Christi is the name of a major Christian festival and is a holiday in many countries with a large catholic population, including Poland. The city in Texas and the movie are named after it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Corpus_Christi

Wait a second. You can't use a privacy themed search engine and expect them to lookup your ip, figure out what city you are in. The entire point of using ddg is to avoid this.

DDG does use ip address to locate you.

It already knows I’m in the UK from my IP address. I get a UK toggle at the top of the page.

For me part of the problem is that DDG feels slow to index new results. Trying to search for anything that’s happened in the last week almost always is a swing and a miss for me.

It’s a stark contrast to google, where the results seem more or less live, including updated auto complete for things that have happened recently.

And that doesn’t seem like an issue at all related to privacy, it’s just a problem space that DDG doesn’t seem to handle well.

Please teach me how to use DDG, as I’m clearly missing something. I’m happy to switch to a service that provides better results in exchange for a bit more effort in constructing search queries, but the results I get for that effort really do need to be better.

The only specific advise I’ve ever seen is “use !g if you don’t get good results the first time”, which really isn’t encouraging.

It’s not about better results. It’s about good enough results without all the spying.

Can you share what is the right vocabulary for example?

I have DDG as main engine for the phone and unless it’s Wikipedia level question, I have to use g!

Don’t use natural language, use keywords and quotes. Essentially the way people searched 5-10 years ago. I rarely need !g

This is the trick. Google got good at letting people search using 'natural' language. DDG is just a bit different. In some ways, I think it's better because my results are more specific in a lot of cases. I look up a lot of academic stuff where Google has the tendency to feed me a lot of garbage that DDG doesn't.

> Don’t use natural language

So... its worse. People want to use natural language.

If I wanted to search using natural language, I'd use Ask Jeeves. DDG is just fine in my experience.

I have to ask, in 2020, or any year, really, was Ask Jeeves ever good at this? Empirically? I can anecdotally it was terrible

I somehow doubt that changed.

Edit: Well I be darned, turns out it was their bread and butter:

https://econsultancy.com/the-state-of-natural-language-conve...

...For certain values of "people", sometimes. I sure don't, it is imprecise, more failure prone and generally gives worse results.

This reminds me of telcos trying to get in to content. "Humans appear to value short audiovisual bursts of stimulation. We shall conquer all by providing all the memes!" And then they knife Tumblr.

It isn't that "people" "want" one search method over another. The search grammar is not why they're there.

It depends on how you look at it. I want to be specific in my searches, which is why I often use quotes, things like `site:somedomain.com`, etc.

That said, that means that DDG is not for everyone. If people want to use Google because they prefer NLP, that's fine, but Google users who trash DDG because it's not smart like Google are totally dismissive of DDG's utility or why people choose it. DDG users on HN, on the other hand, at least seem to understand why people choose to use Google, and I don't think any appreciable number of them expect a large portion of the market to shift towards DDG. In fact, I don't think they believe that DDG is necessarily better. A lot of users, such as myself, use DDG because the UI is a little simpler and because they don't want Google to dominate their life, the compromise being a more stupid but still useful search engine.

Not everyone wants NLP. I dislike NLP and think that it's turning out to be a joke in a lot of ways. When I use natural language with Google, it often doesn't understand my intent, and it even ignores obvious keywords. This is true for pretty much every service or device I've used that has NLP. I don't want it. If others find it useful, that's great, and they should use Google in that case. I don't want it, and that doesn't mean that my chosen tools are "worse".

> which is why I often use quotes, things like `site:somedomain.com`, etc.

this might be true for technical people that don't need accessibility. Nowadays people prefer to use natural language to search, with many people using voice search, either because of preference, or because they need to

I think it is fine to say that DDG targets a different userbase and that the tech community is far more comfortable thinking about computer interfaces and keyword search. But that's not the conversation that people always have about DDG. The conversation is always "why does anybody use Google anymore" and "DDG is a replacement".

Trained in what way? I type a couple words(misspelled) on Google and it magically returns me exactly what I need. Typing special keywords back in the day sucked.

When I search for Fish Tacos on DDG's maps and Google, it's night and day.

DDG gave me 4 results, none anywhere near me.

Do you have a suggestion for how I could have been more effective?

DDG is not good for local stuff. That's in the linked article.

'Fish Tacos [X]' where X is the name of the city - or turning on your region toggle is usually enough to solve that problem.

I do not use DDG for map queries. Google Maps is still light years ahead of anyone else for maps. For non-map queries, DDG is now well ahead of Google except for long tail stuff, for example: technical error messages.

I currently also use Google Maps for map queries.. But I use it through DuckDuckGo, with !gm. I actually find this a better experience than navigating to Google Maps before entering my query.

For POIs, Google Maps is out in front. For motoring directions, Apple is catching up. For walking and cycling, OSM is streets ahead.

I find DDG more useful when I treat it like it's trying to help me use the internet, rather than like it's trying to replace the internet.

try "fish tacos !yelp"

then, why not just use yelp?

The same reason that any ddg bang is useful: fewer keystrokes, one less page load.

IDK, for all sites I use I have them as custom searches. So Yelp would be: "y" -> tab -> search -> see Yelp results page

I never log in to Google’s services in the browser[1]; clear my cookies on browser close; use several other blocking methods for privacy; and have been using DDG as my main search engine for years.

Yet, I’ve used `!g` more in the last months than ever before. In my usage, DDG’s results are getting noticeably worse. It’s unlikely I’ve forgotten “how to use it”.

[1]: I only log in to a Google account for Gmail, and always on an app.

I'm using DDG but I have to "!g" a lot. The English language results are quite good but the German results are often not what I'm looking for. I'm assuming this will improve with time so I'm not too worried but DDG search results can still be improved a lot (imo). That being said, I'm not switching back anytime soon. Pretty happy so far.

FWIW I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

On the other hand, when people say you need to learn how to search DDG, they basically mean you need to add more context to your search because DDG is easily confused and categorically worse.

Having to "retrain" yourself to use DDG is the most romantic way to say "it's a worse tool so you need to give it more context."

I find DDG works for most purposes but I sometimes have to use !s to get meaningful results; even with very specific search terms such as a part number. These days I rarely find a need to use !g but it does happen a few times a week.

Ironically Google changing how it responds to my search queries, and me finally figuring out that's why my google experience has degraded, is what actually made me switch to DDG as my primary search engine.

I've made a promise to myself to start paying attention to this when I do searches, but so far that promise has gone unfulfilled.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that I think I see quite a few SEO hackers pop up on the first page, to the point that it's sometimes difficult to find anything meaty.

I'll try to keep an eye on it this week so the next time DDG comes up I can contribute something substantial (and substantiated).

I use it regularly, but for some programming queries the results could be better and I have to use the Goog.

DDG doesn’t work well for my language, but it works perfectly well for my English searches.

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