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Comment by 34g34vb34v3 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that argument holds very much water. You can test both in sanitized environments, and Google's search is still better. Their algorithm is so much more than "surface content based on personal data" but people are so quick to deduce it down to just that.

I want DDG to succeed, but their search product sucks, and its not because they don't collect data.

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I use DDG for years, and it's at most once a month when I can't find something and need to fall back to Google. Maybe I got used to the suckiness? Or maybe it's relative?

Any time DDG fails me, I just append "!s" to proxy the search through StartPage instead. I've found it scratches the itch pretty well for 99% of my use cases.

Which is just google, right?

In the same sense that "DuckDuckGo is just Bing".

I thought Startpage is literally a privacy layer over Google Search and DDG has their own webcrawler and algorithms built on top of Bing.

I found myself typing !s so much I switched my default to start page. DDG results are really bad imo

DDG = Bing

Startpage = Google

Bing/DDG results suck (when localized to Sweden), so I use Startpage.

I know it's owned by an ad tech company now, but I haven't seen any proof that will affect me. Its reach can't be compared to Google's, which has its trackers on just about every web page (Google Analytics and Fonts).

Looks like Startpage is now what Scroogle was roughly up to a decade ago.

https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/22/scroogle-founder-pulls-the...

I use Google for work DDG for play.

Google is just so much better at finding technical related content.

What does better mean? I've never had any trouble finding exactly what I am searching for when using DDG. As long as I find what I want, does it matter if Google is "better"?

The last time that I checked, DDG was buying search results from Bing (as does Ecosia).

Is Bing that terrible?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

"It uses various APIs of other websites to show quick results to queries and for traditional links it uses the help of its partners (mainly Bing) and its own crawler."

Bing isn't too bad. I've actually half-migrated to using it since the results are often relevant and usually even better than Google.

From my experience, Google is better at searching for programming-related topics, but anything specific and it starts to fall apart. I can make an exact phrase query on Google and it will drop words out of the phrase for no reason. Bing doesn't do this.

Bing has been caught stealing results from Google too. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

It seems like every search engine that isn't google, is still just google but with extra stuff mixed in. It'd be nice to see a competitor that didn't rely on anyone else's search results and only developed and gathered results from their own index.

Apologies for self-promotion. Mojeek Independent and no-tracking https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-track.htm... Gigablast is another and one of very few https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-...

Unfortunately, from what i've learnt from HN that this is not really possible. Most websites ban crawlers\bots with the exception of those run by google and maybe bing. It seems that this market is hermetically sealed.

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