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Comment by rankun | Hacker News Reader

I hear this criticism a lot and I always wonder whether that has something to do with either me not having a Google account and thus using the unpersonalized search, or simply with what I search for, but Google is almost always giving me worse results that DDG or, for that matter, any of the smaller competitors.

Google seems to be filled with sponsored results that are only superficially relevant, and from page 2 onwards, it sometimes feels like whatever it’s giving me isn’t related to my search at all. Even when I’m very specific with my query, using +/- and quoted phrases.

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I'm never logged in to Google, and don't even store cookies by default (although that may or may not be enough to prevent all tracking/personalisation, it's more than "the average" user and does seem to keep the worst out, not that personalisation is necessarily bad; the singular reason I have an account is because I actually like YouTube personalisation – without it I just get idiotic nonsense on the frontpage and now I get stuff I actually want to watch, although the old YouTube model of good categories was still better, but ah well).

I wish I had taken some screenshots, here's the only recent one I have: https://i.imgur.com/b9hu2a9.png – I was trying to find about Cambodian date writing conventions for some i18n code, but all DDG gave me was spam (and most likely, scam) results. Probably not the best search term in the first place ("Cambodian calender" would be better), but it's a decent example.

I should keep a spreadsheet or something, but I'm too lazy for that. And it's not really all that interesting either.

Meanwhile I was trying to find a romantic partner in Cambodia and Google kept giving me useless calendar-related results.

I'm not sure if I did it right, but I searched for "Cambodian date writing conventions" and got this as first result.

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

Yes, my search terms weren't the best, and I did find what I wanted soon afterwards. However, just the inclusion of "dates" shouldn't bring up loads of spam (and most likely scam) sites.

(What I actually wanted to know is how widespread usage of the Khmer calendar is, and if I could get away with just supporting Gregorian).

Sure no Natural Intelligence nor an algorithm could've possibly guessed what you meant with 'date in Cambodia'. Reminds me of the time Blanche Deveraux remarked on the obvious nature of a book titled "Females to Fondle" only to find out it was a tome of the Encyclopedia.

Same for me... I think maybe part of it is that people have forgotten (or never knew) how to choose good search terms, and Google has worked hard on giving good-for-most-people or good-for-your-profile-bubble search results for terribly-constructed search terms, while the others haven't. I've long had the habit of constructing search terms that are minimal but distinct, since I had to do a lot of searching on less-DWIM systems like library catalogs and journal indices dating back to the 90s, and this seems to serve me well with searching DDG. I expect Google simply doesn't care about your actual search terms very much, and gives you stuff matching some kind of linguistic model of your search; what it thinks you want to search for, rather than what you ask for. That would account for it giving worse results on a well-constructed query.

Here's another one I had today: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=maan+leo&ia=web

Maan Leo is a Dutch author. DDG gives me a few bad results about Maan Leo, a few bullshit links about horoscopes ("Make a Leo man chase you"), and finally the Wikipedia page for Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

The Google search gives me results about, well, Maan Leo (in spite of using Indonesian search by the way – this GeoIP stuff Google does is so annoying). For this particular term, DDG is basically useless.

The Brave search results also seem a lot better by the way. Certainly loads better than DDG.

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