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Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

Google search product as become progressively worse each year.

DDG is not much better, I dont believe there is any good search product out there right now, however for technical topics I often find DDG easier to find things from actual manual pages, or Knowledge bases where Google I just get lost of Marketing Blogs trying to sell me something

The ironically exception to this is some time Microsoft own documentation is harder to find on DDG (which is backed by bing) than on google... I think that largly has to do with MS terrible choice to remove technet, and break 50% of their links on the internet.

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I've noticed that I've come to rely more and more on the expandable "Similar Questions" entries in Google, which contain text snippets with the answers to those questions and the linked document which is providing this text.

Search engines without it feel pretty static, like what you get is what you see, and in order to improve your search you need to issue a new one.

google seems to go out of its way to exclude results that match exact wording these days, even with quotes. this is incredibly frustrating, especially for technical searches. i halfheartedly switched to ddg a few years ago but it has become much more earnest in the last year. google is now run by committee or something.

I agree. The only thing that irks me with DDG is that it ranks the official python docs too low. I often end up with results from w3school which I don't want to use. And unfortunately I can't remove domains from the search results.

Yes. It would be pretty cool if we could include a blocked-site list saying "please exclude these sites from my search results."

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/97983/permanentl...

There is a workaround to blacklist certain results using an extension in conjunction with a script for it.

Woot! Super cool. Thank you. That like also refers to https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist. Will check them out.

I've added a keyword search bookmark in my Firefox recently, makes it search in 'verbatim' mode, yields slightly more reasonable results

"https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1"

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