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Comment by nfriedly | Hacker News Reader

I think DuckDuckGo is closer to what you want. Same results for everyone, better privacy, and they're proactive about improving their results.

https://duckduckgo.com/

Part of the problem is that there's a lot more low-quality content to wade through now than there was in 2005. I think the Google of 2005 would have trouble delivering quality results today also.

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> a lot more low-quality content

I wish there was an easy way to filter ALL search results, by permanently excluding specific websites, and/or keywords.

Surely there has to be some browser extension that does this...

Excluding, or penalizing for, advertising and trackers could do wonders against perverse incentives and SEO, IMO. It would also be a better experience for the reader.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29404860

Not got round to trying it yet though.

Great and it even supports iOS…!

Try searching for the same thing from your computer and your phone and you will get different results. Also, their results come from Bing so any improvement happens at Microsoft.

They do use Bing, but not solely Bing. DDG isn't just a frontend to a different search engine.

It's a bing frontend with a few special cases handled differently. For most queries, you get bing results. Easy to check by comparing results.

I see Russian sites from Yandex all the time on DDG.

This. DDG is my primary search engine now and has been for awhile.

I don't use Google anymore to search unless I really need to. The algos they use today are not the same classic ones that actually returned results.

Same. For the sorts of searching I do, anyway, the results I get from DDG tend to be better than what I get from Google. Google tries to infer what I want rather than take me at my word, and is very bad at it.

And if you really need to, DDG !bangs[0] make a search as simple as "!g mother google help me". The keyword thing is also available in Firefox as a browser feature, and elsewhere I'm sure, but nevertheless, it makes switching to DDG easier.

(Plus I can directly go to the wiki page by using "!w", "!gm" for google maps, etc.)

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

The only bang I use is !gvb since DDG doesn't support verbatim searches.

Is this the same as enclosing the terms in quotes and using the !g bang?

it's a google "verbatim" search. I don't know if enclosing each term separately in quotes does the same thing, but this is easier anyway.

I didn't know about the verbatim search. I'm going to give it a try, thanks

DuckDuckGo isn’t really a search engine, it’s a website that uses bing’s api.

Not just Bing, but nearly every search engine you've ever used https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=

Bangs are not APIs. DDG does not access 13,565 APIs when you make a search request.

Does DDG have any of its own organic results yet, or is it still entirely Bing/Yandex?

> I think the Google of 2005 would have trouble delivering quality results today also.

What would you attribute to their modern 2021 success then? Just throwing a ton of money at amazing engineers to hone in their complex algorithm to tweak it to still return what us humans quantify as "good" results? Especially if they are waning through a sea of low-quality content as you say.

both ddg and brave are bing (microsoft) in disguise.

This is not correct. Brave Search owns its own (growing) index and relies on third-parties like Bing for some fraction of the requests. Which is not the same thing as relying fully on Bing or third-parties for results like so many meta-search engines. More detailed answer here: https://search.brave.com/help/independence

Edit: Forgot to say that I work on Brave Search.

brave 'falls back' to bing. which in my experience is most of the time. in fact, out of all the queries i did a while back, they all seemed to come directly from bing. is there a way to disable the reliance on bing and get pure 'brave only' results? and can you be more specific as to what this fraction is? do you blend at all?

You can check exactly which fraction of the results were fetched from Brave's index vs. third-parties using the "independence score" found in the setting drawers (opening can be done with the cog icon at the top right of any page on search.brave.com). There is there a global and personalized score of independence (respectively aggregated on all user's and for your queries only).

Explanation is also found here with screenshots: https://search.brave.com/help/independence

What independence percentage do you see when you click on the gear in upper right of the Brave Search results page?

I get 84% personal (browser-based), 87% global (which means we hit Bing only 13% of the time from our server side).

DDG never worked great for me, and it doesn't have it's own index.

Brave search has been my daily driver and it works wonderful.

I'll give it a try, somehow I missed the announcement even though I'm a Brave user...

https://brave.com/search/

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