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Comment by dandotway | Hacker News Reader

Do you have recent real examples? 98% of the time for me both DDG and Google pull up the same Wikipedia article or Stack Overflow answer or Github repo or news story. Occasionally I still do "!g" or "!gi" in DDG to see what Google has but less and less.

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I just tried to plug in my most recent search from Google: UnsafeVarint, where I was looking for the protobuf method. Google gets me a direct hit to the source code. Perhaps "unfair" because Google knows this result is relevant to that search for me.

I put the same search into DDG and it gives me two mainsteam media articles about COVID as #1 and #2. Useless. People who defend Bing are just out of their minds.

Imagine defending a search engine by microsoft that top-ranks irrelevant articles from its own wholly-owned subsidiary, MSN. Just absolutely the worst search results anyone can imagine.

I just tried "UnsafeVarint" in DDG and while #1 and #2 were useless COVID hits as you said, DDG #4 was the same as Google's #1 hit which was this GitHub issue:

https://github.com/tensorflow/models/issues/7420

Google's #2 hit for me was blogspam at "bankoftrans [dot] com" that copied the source code for UnsafeVarint in order to game Google search results. (A growing problem others in this discussion have been complaining about.)

So Google isn't stellar for your search, either, though perhaps it was working better for you because you were logged in with your Google Account.

Like I said, I do still use Google via "!g" and "!gi" when DDG's results are garbage, but often in these cases Google's results are also junk.

"I put the same search into DDG and it gives me two mainsteam media articles about COVID as #1 and #2. Useless. People who defend Bing are just out of their minds."

Exactly what search query did you use? I just popped "UnsafeVarint" (without quotes) into DDG and it's not remotely "media articles about COVID".

I don't know whether it'll be what you want. It's clearly a long-tail result in DDG as well, but it's at least mostly programming stuff for me, and no COVID at all.

Interesting, because for me, the first result was the link to the source code.

Does it work better for you if you surround the query in quotes?

> ...

EDIT: You are right, double quotes around "UnsafeVarint" improve the result. Learned something new just now. : )

My first result was something in another language but my second result was the GitHub link for a file in protobuf.

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