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Comment by erdo | Hacker News Reader

Even without privacy considerations though, duckduckgo seems to give me better results, I've been using it as my default search engine for years

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I moved over to duckduckgo too, but what I've found is that when I'm searching for some esoteric bug Google is way more likely to give me a decent result, to the point that I'll literally switch back to google for those types of issues.

I think what we need is a search engine which doesn't draw it's revenue stream from selling users data and has it's own spider. DDG essentially is a wrapper around Bing.

Why would DDG be better if it had its own spider? Do you really think a small company like DDG would have a better spider than Bing?

https://yacy.net

DuckDuckGo works really well for 90% of my “searches,” which are basically asking for a specific Wikipedia article / blog / Twitter account / etc, so I don’t have to type in the full URL.

But I find DuckDuckGo really bad for some searches where I’m not looking for a specific domain:

- searching for papers or technical blog posts is almost useless in DDG. Software stuff in particular seems heavily front-loaded towards SEO trash and plagiarized blogs/“tutorials” instead of useful information. Pure mathematics is a little better (probably because there isn’t a “pure mathematics boot camp” cottage industry)

- political news is heavily slanted to the right, often prioritizing flagrantly disreputable sources. While this might be a userbase issue (lots of lonely white men) I do wonder if DDG (or someone in their tech stack) is putting their thumb on the scale (maybe this comes up in Bing as well? I haven’t checked). I realize people on the right might say Google is slanted to the left and don’t want to get in to that. But DDG seems to push more outright propaganda than Google. Google also returns plenty of conservative results for politics news/blogs, but it seems very rare for DDG to return liberal commentary (even from major sources like The Guardian).

Obviously this is anecdotal and colored by my own interests and biases. But, especially with computer science stuff, I have given up on DDG returning reliable results. At this point I basically only use them as a Wikipedia gateway.

> lots of lonely white men

We don't need that kind of rhetoric on HN.

Part of the reason I suspect Bing/DDG return right-leaning content is because grassroots US internet culture itself slants slightly to the right (as it slanted to the left back 10 years ago). Whereas Google pushes authoritative sources heavily, which tend to skew corporate-left.

Corporate content is less likely to push flagrant untruths (unlike grassroots extremists on either side), and what propaganda there is, is usually much more subtle.

A balance is needed, to be sure.

It is a plain statement of fact that far-right politics and privacy-focused tech culture in the US are dominated by white men. It is a reasonable inference to suppose that this would explain why DDG tends to overly promote far-right search results.

You really don’t need to be a social justice warrior to understand my point. It is a shame if either of these completely uncontroversial statements offends you, but HN in fact truly does not need your centrist form of political correctness policing legitimate comments.

I'm not here to be offended, only to disagree with the framing (and provide the additional context I think is more productive for this conversation). You can make those comments all you like.

The ultimate reason I disagree is that the users of DDG don't seem to influence their algorithm. I don't believe DDG is treating users like Google (and shaping results based on interests of the userbase).

Are you based in the US? I found them really bad for localized results outside of the US, even when local mode is enabled (although that's annoying to do manually). In the end I used !g for so many search queries that I switched back again.

I'm in France, possibly I don't use the localisation feature much.

(I actually do use it occasionally to find specialist retailers so I don't have to use Amazon, as it's easy to buy from any other EU country here. German based retailers for audio equipment, or France based retailers if I want to buy cooking equipment etc)

I agree, for localised results Google is much better. I guess it depends what your normal search activity is to how much you'll notice the difference? For everyday searching I find DDG perfectly adequate and enjoy the ad-free, google-product-free experience. !G is handy sometimes though.

DDG has ads though.

Not to the extreme that Google does though - and you can also turn them off.

For European results at least, Qwant is pretty good (and like DDG doesn't log or track users):

https://lite.qwant.com/

Funny, my main annoyance with google results lately is how much they push localized results when I don't want them at all.

> Even without privacy considerations though, duckduckgo seems to give me better results, I've been using it as my default search engine for years

I switched for privacy and to de-google my life.

But for complex queries I often end up using the "g!" shortcut in the query to do the search on google instead.

I use !s for Startpage searches instead of !g - Google without the Google nonsense.

I've found that, it took me a few times to switch over. But I've found that even when I can't find something on DuckDuckGo when I try use Google I don't find it either. I wonder if that is now because I haven't regularly used in a few years and Google isn't able to guess what I'm trying to look for.

Second that, I'm using DDG in the FF. Have also enabled the same for the kids. Wife still protests but I'll switch it when she's sleeping.

Before writing the above I did double check this as I was not sure. So it is a sign that there is not much difference from other engines.

Localized results (in Ireland) are not that great though. But with time I just changed the ways around search queries. It is not really an issue anymore.

I switched to Brave/Safari combo and DDG about a year ago and Signal for messaging. DDG seems to work very well for me. I only resort to using Google is DDG can’t find what I am looking for and that doesn’t happen too often now a days.

As for Chrome, I simply don’t see any reason why anyone would use it over Brave. Brave seems to come pre installed with lots of privacy protection.

I tried Brave about a month ago and stuck with it for a week, but was constantly hitting stability and site compatibility issues.

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