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Comment by annoyingnoob | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo isn't the best search engine. I really want it to be. I use it a by default and I use it often. However, especially when I'm searching for products/things to buy I end up on google search. DuckDuckGo is more like old school search, think Altavista - tons of results but not much useful.

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Maybe it's because Google has very little data on me, but I find Google to be horrible in 2020. It's degraded considerably over the years to the point that I don't even try Google if DDG doesn't return anything useful. It's especially useless if I'm trying to buy something. If I search for a service business using my hometown, it'll return results from businesses everywhere other than my hometown.

Same boat here. More often than not DDG has substantially more useful results than Google does.

Sometimes Google is better though, especially when I'm looking for something specific (an article I know I read or a video I know I watched, etc)

Heh, I don't even know how google feels, much like I don't know how ransomware and heroin feels. We don't really have to try everything in life, do we?

Congratulations on your moral superiority

Hygiene is important for me on its own, unrelated to other people.

Interesting, maybe for english speaking only. At least in my experience google has better results and I'm forced to !g often.

Tbh I don’t really generically search that much. I search within specific sites (e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube) but my first reach out for tool is rarely if ever generic web search. Lots of bangs on ddg

Google doesn't have any data on me and googling for local things works just fine if I put e.g. "plumber <my zip code>"

I have the same experience. I started to notice about 6 months ago. It's happening a lot more often that i'm frustrated with results even when looking for trivial stuff. My last search frustration was: 'bitmitigate'. I had to make a benchmark of CDN services and their company site isn't on the first page like other products i'm searching for. I suspect it's because this company had business with alt-right imageboards, but it scares the shit of me if this kind of political controversies are incorporated now in google's algorythm.

By contrast, searching 'bitmitigate' on DDG produces the expected outcome: the first result is the official .com site of the company.

(Edit: added the last paragraph comparing to duckduckgo)

Odd. I put that in and got their Twitter, a Google "card" for the company, and then their site.

And articles pointing out that they serve Daily Stormer and 8chan.

>My last search frustration was: 'bitmitigate'. I had to make a benchmark of CDN services and their company site isn't on the first page like other products i'm searching for.

Seems to be working for me? SERP for me (not private browsing, but I'm not signed in and regularly clear cookies)

1. BitMitigate - CDN, WAF, DDoS Protection, Load Balancing, VPN <--- this is the main site, as expected.

2. BitMitigate: What we know about 8chan's new web protection ...

3. BitMitigate (@bitmitigate) | Twitter

4. Epik reverses course, says BitMitigate will not support 8chan ...

5. BitMitigate becomes new security provider for 8chan ...

Google search has gotten a lot worse for me now that I use it as a backup for DDG. There's some categories it still does well, but other things are like DDG doesn't find it, but neither will Google. I'm not sure how much of that is Google going downhill (which was a trend before I switched), and how much is the loss of personalization data.

I've also noticed google has developed an extreme recency bias in search results. If you're searching for a term that is somehow related even tangentially to any hot or trending topic over the past year, it is virtually impossible to find relevant, yet dated sources on that topic. I know I can do the timeline filter and all that, but sometimes it's not obvious what window of time you should be searching, etc.

In my experience google is pretty good for fresh and current data. If you try to find things from some years back, results are overwhelmed by irrelevant current results —even setting custom dates doesn’t help much. Seems it’s biased for the present as well as content from big players (obviously), but to the detriment of smaller outfits.

One thing I didnt think if when moved to ddg, is it's almost unusable in smaller languages and local stuff for smaller country..

Now I revert to Google for local and programming. It seems to me tho that the worse Google gets the better ddg gets.

But still beats having AMP, that was last straw for me.

I've set it as my default and I have to say I didn't realize hw often I search for silly stuff it can nail. Like the url of a blog I know the exact name of. If I start to get into detailed programming issues or deeper searches I revert to google. It only seems to be 2-3x a week for me.

I agree, somewhat. While the results are clearly worse my feeling is that they are covering more of my use cases as time passes. The really cool thing (and a trick Google themselves used in the beginning) is that a Google search is only a !g away, so I can easily have it as my default search engine.

Similar. I end up googling around a good quarter of my ddg searches.

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