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Comment by gregman | Hacker News Reader

I think you are describing DDG.

In my experience, DDG is just as bad as Google at producing results that don't match quotes exactly, and almost effectively just adding random results...

It's like they both just want to add something to the results, instead of saying "can't find anything else".

DDG, but actually returning search results.

I made DDG my default, and it's great for 95% of my usage. For specific things where I know there should be better results, then I add a !g or !gi to the search query, which redirects to google or google images.

Yeah, I have done the same. DDG is pretty decent! ... and, I totally did not know about the !g/!gi, thanks for that!!

Check out bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

You usually don’t even need to remember them, for most somewhat popular sites you can just guess the bang, and it searches there.

Ah nice, thanks! I feel like I've seen that page before and just totally forgot about it. haha :)

This. Everyone talks up DDG but it is literally one of the crappiest search engine out there. You never get what you want immediately. I think Bing and Searx are better options compared to DDG.

I thought DDG was bing, just with some privacy

Every time I search for something on DDG and there are no/few results, if I do the same query on Google I only get the insane spam/"hacked small business" websites with random SEO that redirect to arbitrary ads.

And of course Google's own promoted results which are usually only vaguely related to the topic (for example if I search something programming-related, I'll get ads for Udemy or whatnot, but not even a specific course)

I’ve been using DDG for a few years now. They are even worse than google at honoring phrase search. In addition, google sometimes even tells you that they ignored some terms. DDG is just silently searching for some crap you never wanted to search for "to help you". It’s by far my #1 annoyance of DDG.

DuckDuckGo essentially ignores negated terms. Try searching for `49ers -football` and you get a front page full of football links and nothing about the gold rush.

I happen to use both bing and DDG occasionally and the results are plain bad so I end up using Google anyway.

I should try the opposite though: when Google SERP is useless, try others.

This has been my experience as well. Google, Bing, DDG, they all fail to work well in some major form or another. Google and Bing don't let you do explicit search demands with quotes; all the power tricks for search are gone and I routinely find myself frustrated with trying to find some things-- especially if they fall into the gaps where Google insists on excluding a term.

I would gladly switch to a search engine that just got it all right in the way that Google pre-2010 did.

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