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Comment by mr-ron | Hacker News Reader

Ive been using DDG as a default search for a while now. My conclusion is that the results are just NOT as good as Google's. I find myself using Google searches for time sensitive or mission critical searches, which totally defeats the purpose of a search engine.

As an example, I was playing around with Phaser and found that DDG just does not surface the entire Phaser documentation or forums correctly, and had to switch my default browser search for when I was putting time there.

I want to want to support DDG, but the lack of quality around searches makes it difficult.

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I actually like the results on DDG better than Google most of the time:

1. It's more likely to respond to the actual query, rather than guessing what I want based on the query.

2. The results are not stuffed with ads and Google service substitutions.

However it's not as good at searching every last corner of the web, so occasionally I need to g!. It's pretty rare that I use that these days, and rarer that it actually gives me a better result.

For number 2 I use uBlock Origin which seems to take a lot of the issues from ads away from .e

Same. DDG often requires 1-2 additional search terms to give it enough context, but in return I get results that are actually relevant instead of half a page full of pinterest links and other spam content.

I think you can prepend your search on DDG with !g and it'll search google for you, without leaking your info to google.

Actually, by searching with !g, you’re leaking your info to both DuckDuckGo and Google, instead of just Google.

If you want to do Google searches without leaking your data to Google, you could use Startpage.com, but personally I don’t trust Startpage more than Google.

This is what I do as well. Privacy by default, more precision when needed.

>without leaking your info to google.

Can you elaborate? It just does the same query on Google, how is it preventing leakage of information to Google?

If it runs the query through DDG's server side, then Google would just see at as an anonymous query along with a million other anonymous queries coming from DuckDuckGo's servers.

Unfortunately, that's NOT what they do. Instead, they just forward you to the google search result, which is pointless and stupid.

I imagine that Google would not be happy if they ever were to offer such a proxy service.

> which is pointless and stupid

Not so. The point is that you can set DDG to be your default search engine, and put !g anywhere in the search string to search google in case you need it.

You gain nothing privacy-wise by doing that.

DDG and google both know what you searched for. It is not a proxy. It just opens google search with the query

You can use !s for StartPage for the “Google can’t see my queries” layer.

I don't believe startpage. Either they are lying to users about the Google results, or google is lying to them.

Search for '5vh9ld'. It is reddit post's URL.

https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=5vh9ld

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=5vh9ld

5/7 google results are spam that should have been removed. I wonder if the 0/7 on start page is that sort of spam filtering run amuck.

And, if you trust startpage I think there is a "bang" for that as well, maybe !s or something so a DDG user should be able to reach that too from DDG.

I got in the habit of just appending this to many of my queries in time sensitive situations, as if by reflex, negating the purpose (I default my search engine to DDG so !g is the fastest way to Google for me). I am having a hard time breaking the habit.

I'm not sure about the "without leaking your info to Google" part, there. All it does is forward you search query to Google as if you'd entered it on google.com. There's not really anything DuckDuckGo can do about that.

Your browser doesn't have a search bar or what?

I agree, sadly, and in (literally) every discussion on DDG that I've seen, people cite as one of DDG's plus points that you can use !g to search Google instead.

Just out of curiosity, what do you (anyone reading) see when you search "curry" on DDG images?

Wikipedia definition, many recipes, news about Steph Curry... pretty much what I'd expect.

On images?

Oops sorry. Mostly Steph Curry there, not much food. Very different than Google, can't tell what is better - depends which kind of curry one needs...

Thanks, and thank you too, svachalek.

And yeah it's weird that the non-image search is fine, results about the food and about the player, but the image results really stand out.

I have to say I didn't know who Steph Curry was before, but I'm impressed that in the US at least he's bigger than the food.

In general I would say image is more relevant to a human than food.

About 75% Steph Curry, 25% curry dishes.

My findings are that if your search terms are a question, Google results are usually much better.

Why not use DDG to find the correct site, and then use that site's built-in search for finding things within it?

Better yet, if I already know I want a particular doc or site, I'll go directly to that site instead of hopping through a search engine first.

Let me introduce you to a site called Reddit.

I think you’re implying that Reddit’s search is subpar, which I agree, although it seems it has improved slightly, recently. When I want firsthand perspective on something I usually append “reddit” to my google searches instead of searching reddit itself, even if I have a reddit tab open already.

On relatively sparse, self-post (fow or no link) subreddits, Reddit search is fairly useful for searchin posts only.

Comments are not indexed.

At volume and with links, search breaks down from both insufficient context (esppecially with editorialised, sensationalised, or vague titles) and excess low-yield content.

s/fow/few/

Plenty of sites have terrible search and discovery stories. I routinely search in a general purpose search engine and filter to the site whose results I want because it's faster and more reliable than trying to navigate the site itself.

Please use reddit search via the Reddit site, and then via Google/DDG to see the difference.

It's been a decade since the majority of sites had a usable search of their own. Many that still do are just hosting a site-specific Google search at this point.

Usually you get much better results by doing the opposite, go to Google and run the search with site:reddit.com or wherever.

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