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Comment by shantnutiwari | Hacker News Reader

I have been using DDG for a few years, and find a few problems with their results:

* Some spammy links slip thru-- these are dumb sites with lot of stuffed keywords and zero actual content. I dont get these with Google. I've usually seen these when searching for questions related to email list providers, like Aweber or Activecampaign

* Last year, I started getting random porn results for harmless queries, like "Monster videogame 2010". Again, didnt get these on Google.

For these reasons, Im hesitant to recommend DDG to non-technical users.

Why I stick with DDG-- I like to search in private windows, and Google harasses you everytime to accept their terms and conditions. On my iPhone, if I have 10 tabs open, I'll have to do this 10 times. DDG saves me a lot of this hassle.

For me, the privacy is a bonus, but like other commenters have said, there is no way to verify these claims.

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My occasional accidental Google search for programming related things has been filled with spammy sites - I wouldn't quite describe them as "no content", but there really wasn't much of it. DDG isn't really better, but I definitely wouldn't say it's worse, at least for my searches.

To clarify-- I didnt mean low quality, just zero quality.

so if I searched for "How to move my email list to Aweber" I would get a page that was a copy paste of the Aweber home page, with my search term randomly sprinkled in.

And it wasnt just 1-2 sites. Sometimes, the top 3-4 would be spam, and even Aweber's own help page would be pushed down.

Seemed to me someone was doing some sort of dynamic search stuffing which was fooling DDG, but not Google. But the dark SEO was so obvious, I'm surprised DDG (or Bing or whoever they get their results from) fell for it.

I've gotten that exact thing on Google but for some stack overflow questions or articles. However, they were usually pretty far down the list, though still on the first page.

Hmm. For your test query, both provide similar results (mostly links to blog.aweber.com), though Google has a higher percentage of third party YouTube videos.

I’m often amazed how many Wikipedia ripoffs can get such high rankings on Google.

>I have been using DDG for a few years, and find a few problems with their results:

I've tried it a few times, this latest time I've been using it exclusively for a month or two and the results are almost completely worthless 95% of the time and I end up using the !g operator. In many cases the results have nothing to do with that I typed at all.

I've de-googled in every other way possible but Google's search engine is so much better than everything else I've tried that the rest are unusable.

I've heard it said before that Google's effectiveness is mostly due to the vast amount of information they have about me but that's not it. I've used lots of computers all over the East coast that I had never used before without logging into an account and Google gives good results every time.

Do you have any example queries? I’ve had the exact opposite experience (g! is generally worse than the ddg results).

I like to search in private windows, and Google harasses you everytime to accept their terms and conditions.

I use incognito too for almost everything. However, I thought that the terms & conditions popup was only a Youtube thing (it drives me insane too)... I guess they haven't rolled it out to everyone yet.

Yeah, I get them for both Youtube and google

Good point about search in private windows, without nagging.

I do much of my web browsing in private browser tabs. Why not? Even for things like HN, auto fill for login makes it easy and then when I follow links I don’t worry so much about tracking cookies.

For 2, what are you leaving safe search at? When off, that seems like it's probably correct behavior for a search engine, and google removes it as people find it undesirable.

Whatever the default is-- I guess safesearch on?

It only happened for a brief time, so I guess it was a bug in DDG. But when it did happen, it was serious enough I stopped using DDG at work completely.

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