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Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

There have been reports and speculation that they’re doing just that. Of course it’s worth it for the negotiation threat alone, but Apple also really doesn’t seem to like depending on Google.

I personally can’t see them switching any time soon, as DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible and I’m not sure they can do much better without collecting more data.

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>DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible

I would like someone to make some objective research on that.

My experience is the reverse, so I strongly suspect our reticence is just one of changing our habit more than an real thing.

I switched to DDG years ago and it took a few weeks to wean out the tendency to compare searches, usually brought on by the fear of missing out something.

I very rarely have to resort to a !g search and usually if I can't find it on DDG, I won't easily find it on google either.

I don't feel like missing out on anything and I always find what I need (and if I don't, I can't find it in other searches either).

Other platforms have some strength in some area, like Bing and Google have more tools for image searches, and it's possible that one of these is better than the others at some specific domain, like research papers or patent searches.

But after switching to DDG, all these options are still available and -at least in my case- 99%+ of my needs are met with it.

Having used DDG for almost a decade now, I indeed doubt any objective research would come up showing the results are never up to par or even better than Google's (or other search engines for that matter). Of course I'm also not going to compare DDG results with others when DDG immediately finds what I need so never really checked that myself actually..

Still, no matter how much I like and promote DDG, I'm definitely not in the 'I always find what I need' camp. I don't know why but DDG is simply bad in some aspects. Sometimes it can be circumvented by altering search terms, but other times I have the impression after all those years its crawling or database is still lacking. I encounter this almost daily, most recent example: searching for 'preamp for hypex' Google and Bing (in private search windows) immediately turn up posts from audio forums I expect to have these topics. DDG just doesn't have those probably, because instead it automatically "Includes results for amplifier hypex" (which I find extremely annoying in any case, and makes no sense in this case since the word 'preamp' is key) and after forcing it to quote each term instead then it still doesn't come up with the expected results.

As somebody who worked on search engines in the past, I think there are contradictory requirements from different people. Some people only vaguely know what they want, and want the search engine to be smart and give them as broad field as possible, and if it doesn't, they call it "dumb". Some people need very precise thing in a sea of similarly looking things, and they need the engine to be strict, up to following the exact word order and keeping "filler" words in (looking for "to be or not to be" with common words filter on might be hard :) and so on. And if the engine is not strict enough, they call it "full of junk". It's very hard to find the right balance between the two, especially if you don't build per-user profiles. I'm not saying there aren't solutions but it's a very tricky business with a lot of failure modes.

I can't add research but perspective: I search in English, German, French and sometimes other languages. For EN DDG is hit and miss, I'd say 1/2 times it gives me the result that I'm looking for. For DE and FR the result quality is often much lower.

This means at least about half the time I end up with a !g I'm my DDG search.

I don't think bing will be a useful competitor in the long term, but a company that focuses on non-English national/linguistic markets, especially those with own character sets can compete in that area, innovate and hopefully also branch out on the EN market (see Yandex - RU; Yahoo - JP; various CN players).

I've found it's very dependent on what I'm searching for. DDG results tend to match my search patterns better, but it often seems they are missing pages with all the correct keywords that google returns. I suspect it just comes down to Google having crawled more pages, and having had more resources to invest in optimizing result hierarchies.

I'm sure it is fine for English (American). I'll try it again, but as someone who is English (British) it was awful, and never could get UK localised searches correct.

There is not much interesting stuff on the internet these days outside closed FB etc, so search is just not as important as it used to be.

I don’t use Facebook at all and I’ve never had any problem finding interesting stuff on the Internet (quite the opposite - there is too much stuff and not enough time). What interesting stuff is only available on Facebook?

That's a sad statement. I never even had Facebook and I love the Internet.

I think it's opposite. There is as much good stuff as before but it's drowned in crap, and that's exactly why search engines are so important.

You must be kidding. There are worlds of interesting stuff outside FB, in fact if FB ceased to exist this very moment, the amount of interesting stuff around would not diminish by even a thousandth of a percent. If you think interesting stuff is only on FB, maybe this is the time to try and broaden your horizons and actively look outside of it.

Ironic for this debate to be happening here (publicly indexed, searchable)

I found it varies. When I don't find something with DDG, I use !g to switch to Google. Google often finds it.

But the reverse is true too. DDG is now my default, but before, when Google didn't find something, I'd switch to DDG.

There is an implicit learning curve switching search engines. The way one crafts searches differs in subtle ways I don't understand on a conscious level.

Instead of using !g as fallback, I prefer to use !sp. You still get the Google results but they are proxied via startpage.com for better privacy.

I used to mainly use startpage.com, but when they were sold to a subsidiary of an adtech company, I stopped using them.

> DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible and I’m not sure they can do much better without collecting more data

Last I checked, DDG's search results are just Bing (aside from the infobox-type stuff which is from their own data sources), and Bing does collect data from Microsoft's browsers and toolbars https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

A year ago, after becoming fed up with my dad clicking financial scam ads, I switched his search to DDG. Thus far, he hasn't noticed.

Google results aren't much better, I feel that nowadays, if I want to find anything relevant, I need to use site:, and most often than not, it'll be either stackoverflow, reddit and some other french sites. Anything else is either spam/sales or ebay "proxys".

It's scary how the web feels much more narrower.

Yeah using reddit for a lot of searches is usually my default now.

Search for reddit/stackexchange/whatever pro forums, but on Google.

BTW I wish any stackexchange sites are under single domain.

my experience (sample size < 5) is that people that use Google with an adblocker have a very nice experience and don't have an adblocker have a miserable experience.

I would say that for the internet as a whole.

I use DDG on all my devices, and my experience was very good. I fallback to Google in, perhaps, 1% of cases.

I've been using DDG for years now and the results are entirely adequate. There are some niches where Google still delivers better results but I need them no more than once a month, sometimes even less than that. I guess it depends on which part of the data set you're hitting...

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on all devices for years. I’ve never had a problem finding what I’m looking for and have never felt the need to use a different search engine to get different results. YMMV.

DDG search has been much better for me than google and has been for a few years. Google search has become a complete disaster. I'm curious about what you mean by DDG being so much worse.

That sounds like a cartel to me.

The tide has shifted this year and ddg is returning better results

DDG is so much better than Google for me.

Likewise for me. I think the primary reason for this is the huge decline in the quality of Google search results over the last decade.

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