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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I often find DDG better at programming related questions. Google is frequently useless there.

My experience has been the exact opposite. As soon as I need to look up something very specific or niche DDG does not deliver and that's when I need it the most.

Google's index is 4x bigger (I can't recall the specific numbers but it was mentioned in a recent competition report in the UK)- I'd expect Google to be better at returning long tail stuff where perhaps Bing (and thus DDG) simply don't have the depth of documents to return.

/edit here's the quote/source

"We found that Google’s index is larger than that of Bing in terms of number of pages in the index. Based on submissions from these parties, Google’s index contains around [500 -600 billion] pages and Microsoft’s index contains around [100- 200 billion] pages."

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5efb1db6e90e0...

Not just that, but it feels like I get more results that are just rehosted StackOverflow answers when using DDG.

Really? I used to get those a lot on Google, and after switching to DDG I get real StackOverflow again.

A lot of sites try to game their Google rankings. It's possible DDG is less subject to that.

DDG is more willing to stick a stackoverflow answer at the top, which is usually what I want. When the issue becomes more language-specific or obscure then I have to resort to !g.

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