Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

> The search results suck

Do they really though, for normal people that is?. Some of my searches today below, can't remember the exact terms I used. Mix of DDG and Google.

1) Walt Whitman, I wanted a basic overview of his work to satisfy some idle curiosity. DDG gave me his wikipedia page. Bingo

2) EAN-13 check digit. First result wikipedia telling me how to calculate it. I see it is simple and I have a long list in Excel to check. I can't be bothered to think so...

3) EAN-13 Excel. First result has an example that I copied and pasted.

4) Timezone [niche cloud system]. Said system didn't do what we expected, seems to be timezone issue. First article is discussing this niche issue and offers solutions

5) Does Shopify support x payments. Yes it does

6) Coronavirus test. Got straight to government site.

7) MacOS version numbers. First hit...

8) How come my Microsoft x platform is showing as being at y level of service when my Buddies is not. Straight in

Am I just a perfect search customer? I don't seem to be getting the problems Drew is?

I suspect that anyone who claims that Duckduckgo "Just works" only do english search. I usually do "english" / "mother tongue" searchs all day. Everytime, I need to remember to toggle the regional button otherwise I get attrocious results. Whereas google simply understand that if I'm searching using the english language it should prioritize english results while if I'm searching in another language it should prioritize it instead.

It gets tiring quickly and I find easier to append !g instead of clicking the regional toggle button.

On the contrary, I like the explicit language toggle because some search terms have better results with a specific language. I get annoyed when I enter a programming related search term and get non-English results.

I also find that even with the regional toggle off, my results are still skewed towards my location or the native language of it. This is true for both DDG and Google. I want results completely agnostic of where my IP happens to be positioned.

And your account histories as well! It sucks(more than sucks) when Google only lets me what I want from someone else’s browser.

I really wish Google would prioritize English results for English searches consistently. I'm living in Japan as a native English speaker, and have my OS, browser and logged in Google account all configured for English only. Despite that, Google search results always prioritize Japanese language content. Every now and then (though not consistently) it gives me a yellow popup asking if I'd like English results instead, which is a bit disappointing given they already have all the information they should need to make a judgement call about that. Maybe the individual experience here depends on the languages and regions involved.

Was going to post the exact same thing. This was my experience while living in Japan too. To me, the takeaway is that you simply cannot catch everyone with your defaults. Google and DDG have made different prioritization defaults and the result of that is what we see in anecdotes in this thread.

You don't need to catch everyone with your defaults. You just need to make it possible to not use the default.

Sure, give me local results if I don't specify anything. But let me tell you if I want results in English now.

> To me, the takeaway is that you simply cannot catch everyone with your defaults.

You don't have to. DuckDuckGo allows [0] to create a link with settings: https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=jp-jp.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/settings

There was a time, a long time ago, where google had this:

www.google.com/ncr

'ncr' here stands for no country recognition. It allowed many expats to do technical searches without the noise of regionalization results.

Of course someone clever at google figured out that was probably too useful and now it just redirects you back to google.com because screw all those niche use-cases.

That's not what it was. "ncr" was "No Country Redirect".

When you were in a different country (e.g., India), and you typed in google.com out of habit, it would recognize your IP-geo and redirect you to the country-specific domain (e.g., google.co.in).

If you really just wanted google.com for whatever reason, then you'd type google.com/ncr. It then wouldn't redirect you based on your IP-geo, and you'd stay on google.com.

In other words, google.com/ncr _always_ redirected you back to google.com. Then, and now.

Thanks for correcting the acronym TIL.

However you can see from the comments in both android police [0] and reddit [1] that, irrespective of your assertiveness, the behaviour did indeed change at least in 2017 if not more times before.

It at the very least used to preserve the suffix and absolutely respect no regional results. It's the same as the old bolean operators, google claims the behaviour is unchanged but will silently ignore them.

[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/27/changing-googles-do...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/4xda1p/googlecomncr...

For me (German) it’s different. With DDG, I can easily choose to search for German content (by using !ddgde), with google I have to hope that they search for what I want. Sometimes google does, sometimes it does not. And if it doesn’t I’m out of luck unless I go into the settings and look for a way to tell it what to do.

Google automates, DDG leaves me to choose. I prefer the 2nd approach every time.

Thank you for the !ddgde bang - I face exactly the same problem as you.

It's also very useful to have that control when you live in another country. I'm in Spain now, but most of the time I want to search in English or even French. Google only gives you local results.

Alternatively, you can go to the settings [0] and create a special URL: https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=de-de.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/settings

> Google automates, DDG leaves me to choose. I prefer the 2nd approach every time.

This is exactly why I like DDG way more than Google and why I love to use Alfred instead of Spotlight on my Mac. With DDG you have !bangs and with Alfred you also can tell him what you’re looking for. 99.9% of the time I know I’m looking for a file or a folder or a definition of a word or want to open an app or want to search the web etc. With Spotlight you’re stuck to the order Apple designed the results to show up

I do a lot of searches in French, where a lot of the words are identical to English (English being heavily influenced by French), especially if one leaves out the accents.

I also search in Spanish (Castilian), but sometimes I want results from Latin America, sometimes from Spain.

Being able to set the language/region is of incredible help in both cases. There is no way to automatically detect this.

I actually prefer the toggle button for regional search. Also when I search in native tongue Google sometimes (like when using brand names, models of devices etc) gives me 2-4 pages of advertisement and stores links. It's hard to find a large companies homepage.

In DDG it's usually the first page.

I still do a lot of !g when I search technical stuff, as it lets +word -word and DDG doesnt find a lot of weird github issue pages, old forums, usenet posts sometimes.

DDG works well for Swedish. As for Finnish, DDG doesn't suck more than Google does.

Yeah, all of these are quite DDG-friendly searches. It is my default engine and, yes, some results do suck quite consistently.

I'm a bit lazy right now to remember all the problems it has, but some of the most obvious are looking up for news on recent events (especially something small, stuff that doesn't appear in reuters and these sorts of media) and trying to find out some basic stuff about local shops and such (of course, I only know about how it feels in my location, not worldwide). On both occasions I pretty much always use "!g ..." right away, because DDG is just clueless about this shit. Google does this just fine (in fact, sometimes it's even impressive: there are thousands of cities like mine, yet Google can often tell me where I can buy some stuff I'd have no idea where to look for).

> Yeah, all of these are quite DDG-friendly searches...

This is exactly correct. Excluding poor local search results (which is understandable bc of the privacy aspect), Bing/DDG has trouble with long tale search query relevance (5+ word queries), and also finding results from small or obscure sites. The later is simply because Bing's organic index is not as large as Googles.

Bing/DDG's organic results are still very good, but they are not as good as Google's in the above specific circumstances.

Compared to Google, Bing has a huge problem with paid search results, at least in some non english languages.

My mother wanted to access Amazon last week and typed "my amazon account" in french in the windows search, which searched for those terms in Bing. One of the first (paid) results was a scam site triggering alarm sound, fake virus notifications and asking her to call a scam hotline.

At least DDG filters out the ads but the problem in this case is Bing's OS integration.

> Bing/DDG has trouble with long tale search query relevance

The last time I did a comparison, Bing did better (I don’t know what DDG does with the Bing results exactly, everyone says they just show Bing results, but no one knows and it simply doesn’t mesh with my experience).

Because Bing does not randomly filter out half my terms while DDG does even for "-forced terms. This is my #1 problem with DDG and I complain about it in pretty much every DDG thread (while otherwise loving DDG).

For few result searches, DDG shows you essentially random stuff even if they have the result I want (which can be tested by searching for an exact sentence from the result page). On the other hand doing the search on Bing gives me the result without neutering my query.

I am typing this from India. DDG never provides satisfactory results for anything country specific. As an example, point 6 above is a failure. I used to have DDG as my default, but my workflow got so convoluted that I would search first on DDG, see that the results as not good, open google and search again. It is so frustrating that I switched back to Google even when I didn't want to.

Edit: typos.

I'm sure others have commented this elsewhere, but DDG has bang operators.

For your use case, simply append !g to the DDG search and it will do a Google search instead.

Right, but Google supports Google search without bang operators.

No way!

Did you use localized search or the general search? For me 6 works great with !ddgde

Thank you, I didn't know that feature. I almost always used g! to switch to Google when searching for country specific terms, guess I can change that now.

I don’t find a !ddgde equivalent operator for India(en).

In consumer search there is a really long tail of questions (in 2017 15% of Google's daily queries have never been seen before[1]) and performance on this is very important.

I just searched for "lockdown rules for SA" (I'm in South Australia and we just had a new 20 person cluster, so we are going back into lockdown).

On DDG the first results was a Guardian article which was good, but then the rest were a mix of South African articles and blog spam. There were no SA Gov pages on the first page of results.

On Google the first result was the South Australian gov site with the rules, the second was the Guardian article, then more SA Gov pages and at result 8 I got a South African result.

https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

I got this:

https://www.enca.com/news/sa-lockdown-strick-international-t...

Which is about South Africa - which might be a good result for you, depending on where you live.

So at least they are trying to to location based results.

Well, I am in PDX, so....

Hrm, I think it's extremely iffy to abbreviate South Australia like that in a search query. You don't need the "for" either.

BTW, when I perform the same search, Google's first result is "What Are the Lockdown Rules for South Africa? A Guide for ..." and all the other results on the first page are about South Africa too. (Note: I'm in Japan)

> Hrm, I think it's extremely iffy to abbreviate South Australia like that in a search query.

Everyone in Australia uses "SA" - this is one of the reasons why location based context is important.

> You don't need the "for" either.

I worked on consumer search for a few years, and on text based search word like "for" are helpful to get exact match. Even if the term frequency of "for" on its own isn't particularly useful "for SA" absolutely is. (And these days with neural ranking using sub-word parts it is even more useful).

SA is how all Australians would word that.

Interesting. Good example. :)

Searching for "lockdown rules" "sa" (together) just now gave a bunch of South Australian specific results with the "Australia" localisation setting enabled.

With the localisation setting disabled, all the results were indeed about South Africa instead.

They do. Something fundamentally changed at some point during the past couple of years. It used to be that DDG was the best for verbatim search (meaning I want to only have results were the exact words I search for are included).

Now, even with quotes, I routinely get a whole first page of results where my terms are not included anywhere. Google generally respect the quotes.

I have noticed the same problem with DuckDuckGo searches recently.

I hope that a verbatim search function will be restored in the future; I think it's an essential basic tool for a search engine, and without it the user can be left with the impression that the engine either doesn't understand what it is being asked to do, or that it is wilfully disregarding instructions because it thinks — often wrongly — that it has a better idea of what the user is searching for than the user does.

Agreed. Getting results which don't include the quoted terms is mind bogglingly useless.

I thought the whole point was to improve over time, not get worse. :(

This was exactly my problem. I tried to love DDG, I really did, but this behavior was so annoying that I turned back to Google a few months ago.

(No, I do not consider typing "!g" before any search that contains quotes a solution to the problem.)

I use ddg often myself.

Google does infer purpose better, and if someone is looking to buy something, it does well there too.

Ddg is very good at info queries and the more one uses it, the better it is.

What they could do is exactly what google did and that's to review those uses and improve.

But what they have right now is solid, given just a tiny bit of work.

The biggest habit I had to break moving from Google to DDG was phrasing everything as a question.

If anyone is thinking of making the switch, you can always redirect your searches to Google by throwing a g! in the query.

> phrasing everything as a question.

I wonder if this is generational or cultural?

Personally, I dislike trying to interface with a machine using natural language, because I know it can’t really understand me, and I’d rather read and interpret the results for myself than have an algorithm pick the “best”.

I actually find speaking to machines (e.g. automated phone systems, Siri etc) using natural language quite embarrassing, as if we were pretending that real life was like Star Trek.

This. We do not have machines able to sort meaning out yet, so why bother?

For most information retrieval purposes, Google's NLP algorithms can effectively determine the meaning of your query thanks to BERT

In a simple probabilistic sense, sure. Shove enough data at the problem and the easy cases work out. Those are only a small subset of the problem space.

Until we address meaning, my statement remains solid. And it can often be easier to treat the tool like what it is rather than figure out how to best pretend it is something it is clearly not.

I also hate talking to machines, minus some exceptional circumstances. I find it especially annoying when phone menu systems insist that I talk to them. Some of them don't even respond to mashing zero.

I think its less about trying to talk to Google, and more about phrasing your search the way somebody would ask it on some random forum. That is often the benefit of asking as a question.

Although such queries are habit forming and now google does a decent job understanding the actual question

Funny, I never used questions with Google, until very recently, and only with some queries.

Got good at including words for context early on and never stopped.

Out of curiosity — what made you start?

Seeing a few queries others did. Now, if it seems like an obvious question, I may try it.

My default remains word searches. Frankly, better operators would benefit me more than questions would.

I really do not always want to formulate a question. Doing that makes sense sometimes.

Often, I want to see relevant info, then formulate other queries.

It sucks for me when I search anything outside technical/science and daily life.

It also sucks at retrieving very new information.

And I say this as someone who set DDG as default.

I mean, you do seem to be DDG’s ideal user. You searched for mostly technical issues, and a hot political issue.

Apart from that, it's nice that is has no commercial bias. For instance if I search for a thing that is both a real thing and a product, I get the real thing returned.

Still, for really niche topics if search needed there is no way around Google. On the other hand Google is not the only way to explore the web, let alone auto-complete a url...

I also have no issues with DDG but most of my searches are pretty specific or I'll just end up at the Wikipedia page anyway.

Other than that, I've been using [Runaroo](https://www.runnaroo.com) as well.

I’ve tried searching for stuff related to Alexa Presentation Language (APL) a bunch of times. It never finds anything useful; I throw “!g” on the query string and what I’m looking for is typically the first or second result.

Yep, DDG gives me much better results than Google. Even if I'm searching in Spanish.

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