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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely agree with your comment.

Every time I set DDG as my default search engine, I return back to Google after two weeks because I get fed up of using !g to get proper search results.

If I know the site where I can get what I seek e.g. Reddit, SO, HN then bangs on DDG are useful but when I don't know which site would get me the information I seek, DDG fails me 9/10 times in giving me a proper result and I have to resort to !g.

DDG needs to be a better search engine first than anything else if it needs to survive, just advertising Privacy wouldn't cut it, Hypothetically If Apple announces a search engine tomorrow most of DDG customer base would shift even if Apple had a poor search engine just because 'Apple sells Privacy better'.

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My experience has been that DDG produces satisfactory results 95+ percent of the time and Google produces more ads that crowd out the results 100 percent of the time.

It depends very much on where you live. Localized results outside of the US suck with DDG. Yes, you can set a language but you always have to set/unset it and even then it's not great at providing results that are relevant to a specific location, even if specified in the search query.

On the other hand that's no wonder, from all search traffic I've seen, Google tends to crawl 5-10x as much as Bing (DDG bot is basically non-existant). Google's index is much broader and more current than others because they crawl basically the whole web constantly. It's no wonder that Bing lags behind Google if they crawl everything apart from the most popular pages irregularly.

I've been using DDG for a couple of years. It produces satisfactory results as long as I describe what I'm searching for thoroughly. Google knows me well and is able to surmise a lot from a much shorter query.

In the same vein, if I want unbiased results, DDG is strictly superior to Google.

> In the same vein, if I want unbiased results, DDG is strictly superior to Google.

And if you want good results, without dumping every buzzword you know about your search, Google is strictly superior to DDG.

That used to be true, but Google search result quality diminished significantly in the past couple of year, because it started to get too creative with keyword dropping and substitution. I often see the single most important keyword in my query dropped to produce more results, or replaced with a more generic category (e.g. "Linux" replaced with "Unix"), or even replaced with something that's not actually a correct substitute at all (e.g. "FreeBSD" replaced with "Linux").

This is my experience as well. If DDG gave me the same quality of results as Google, I might use it. Until then, I don't care. Privacy alone isn't going to cut it, if I only cared about privacy and not the results, I would send my queries to /dev/null instead.

Define 'proper search results'. I guess you only search for common things that Google has optimized for.

In my experience, Google now stuffs the results with everything they can think of that's even remotely related (or even unrelated). There's so much noise that specific searches are useless.

On the other hand yes, if you want to find a pizza near you, Google is still best. I guess they should rebrand to 'restaurant finder'.

Term BMW - in Google, 2nd result is the local site while in DDG there is no local result at all. Sure, i can check the Region option and it will show up, however the region option completely messes up search results for different terms because when i search for a different thing half of results are from Japanese sites and not even English (i am not close to Japan). Another Google thing that i like is that there is a date for posts which DDG doesn't seem to have unless i am missing it in the settings.

As a lot of other people said, Google still wins for local info. But nothing else IMO.

Try searching the model of your TV + review on Google. Tell me what page the first actual review comes in. If there's any, and not only stores trying to sell it to you or machine generated pages.

My locale is FR but if I search for "BMW UK" in DDG it gives the UK sites immediately.

DDG doesn't have accumulated personal knowledge of you, so you have to be explicit. I don't see that as a high cost given the benefits.

Really? In my experience, when DDG doesn't find what I need it rarely happens that Google does.

Perhaps it has to do with search behaviour, perhaps what I search for has better results on Google (even though the quality of search results on Google have degraded extensively over past several years in favour of sites hosting large volume of content).

Every time I don't get a result I seek from a search engine, I think about making note of it for a 'search engine wall of shame', but I never acted upon that as the urge to solve problem at hand takes precedence. I will try to start making it a habit here on, so that I can provide some facts for such future discussions.

> g to get proper search results.

the difference being, for me, that DDG produces deterministic results, I can share search terms and get the same list.

With Google that's impossible

I also guess Google learns from my g! searches on DDG to rival with it and give the impression it knows better

Repeat the same search on another computer or with another user and complete different results appear, usually not better than DDG plus ads

DDG real weakness is localized content. Content in my language is way worse than what Google picks up.

I agree DDG is not good enough to replace Google, but that doesn't mean I want them to die off because of some bullshit auction. They provide a good enough product for some, clearly and I hope it continues to improve so I can benefit from it too one day.

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